


auscultation

by malfaisant



Category: Marvel 616
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-14
Updated: 2016-05-01
Packaged: 2018-02-08 12:33:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 34,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1941246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/malfaisant/pseuds/malfaisant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Perhaps that was why Tony wasn't caught so off-guard this time, why he was immediately certain this was a hallucination. Why there was no desperate hope that this was really Steve, come back from the dead. In their line of work, the possibility wasn't wholly ridiculous, or even unlikely. Steve had done it once before, after all. Maybe he’ll do it again. Maybe if Steve was an X-Man, Tony thought.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Set during Dark Reign and IIM's _World's Most Wanted_ to _Stark Disassembled_ , with heavy canon references to that era and some IM v3/v4 in the background. See end notes for more spoiler-y details.

There were worse ways of losing, but not very many. Envisioning nobler ways to die was a waste of time, but that didn’t stop Tony from wishing for something better than this slow, humiliating necrosis.

So here is where it starts, at Tony Stark’s own personalised version of the end of the world.

Of course, there was no true beginning. These were things put into motion long before he saw it coming. There had been signs that pointed to this end, markers on a well-paved road, but for all his talk of the future, Tony Stark was a shitty futurist. He wanted to laugh, but his life had always been a series of heavy-handed allegories. No sense in expecting it to change now.

This time around, it had taken the form of the madman standing right in front of him, with a face twisted in ill-disguised avarice and glee.

“So,” Norman Osborn started, “your last day.”

An implication hung unspoken in the air, like a gun held to his temple, the finger on the trigger itching to go off. Tony shrugged. “Yes, ah—yes, sir. I’m off to the departure scan and then I’m gone.”

Osborn didn’t look at him, only continued to look out through the glass walls of the director’s office, hands clasped behind his back. The helicarrier hovered over midtown, the outline of the Hudson lining the near horizon. Tony thought he must be fancying himself as some magnanimous ruler looking over his kingdom, and promptly bit back the urge to gag.

Osborn inhaled deeply, before replying. “Marvelous.”

Tony rolled his eyes, and started to approach him. “Oh, come off it, Norman, you and I both know—”

“Ah, ah, ah, don’t come near me.” Osborn raised a hand and turned from where he stood behind the desk, and Tony wondered if that’s what people saw when _he_ had been in charge, why people had been so resistant to his authority. If he looked just as mad and power-hungry and merely failed to notice, then he really couldn’t blame his detractors for resisting him as hard as they did.

“If you come any closer, I might just be tempted to break your neck, you traitorous scum.”

“Traitorous,” he says, eyes widening in disbelief at how ludicrous this situation was. Then his face turned cold, contemptuous, because there’s a long list of people who have all the reason in the world to call him traitor, but _Norman fucking Osborn_ was not on that list. “Whatever you say, boss.”

“You have turned over all HAMMER property, and removed all of your personal effects, yes?”

Packing up the contents of his office had taken no time at all. When the helicarrier fell out of the sky, all it had done was jostle the meager furniture in place. The only thing he had taken aboard was the armor, now barely operable without the Extremis to interface with it. The office was empty of anything aside from personal memories.

There was nothing here of any value to him.

“Yes,” Tony replied. “When I leave, I’m gone. Everything that’s mine will be gone too.”

“And you’ll take nothing that belongs to me.”

“To HAMMER, you mean. It belongs to HAMMER, not you.” Tony tilted his head to the side, slid his hands in his pockets, and smiled innocently.

“Semantics,” Osborn hissed. “And what about the database?”

Let’s start again. Disgraced former Director of SHIELD, ousted out of power, no friends, no company, and with no choice but to systematically dismantle everything he worked for, render every sacrifice he made meaningless. In this instance, Tony would be tempted to call foul on karma for being too on the nose, if he believed in such things.

“Database?” His voice was flat, completely and utterly bored. “And which database would that be?”

Osborn narrowed his eyes. "Don't be daft. The Superhero Registration Database."

"Oh," Tony said. "That. Well, it's where it should be, isn't it?"

The expression on Osborn's face at Tony's reply, as he calmly reasoned that he couldn't access the database without a warrant, was almost entirely worth it. His face scrunched in anger, he settled for dismissing Tony in the meantime; no doubt the second he was gone, Osborn would try his Director's security codes.

The Extremis was no longer in his system, but Tony thought he could feel the faint flicker of his code coursing through HAMMER’s systems, a virus crawling from the central control servers to the intel mainframe, waiting to trigger the moment Osborn tries to access the Superhuman Registration database. He couldn’t stop Osborn’s rise to power, but he could at least wipe the slate clean before he left.

So Tony let Osborn posture, allowed him to lord over his victory. Let him call himself _Commander_. He passed Victoria Hand at the doorway, holding a clipboard to her chest and fidgeting slightly, as he dismissed himself and walked out of the office.

(This is his declaration of war, which is why we start here, before everything. Before the deserts of snow and the cold rattling his bones. Before a voice calls out to him in the blank white, carrying hopes that he will use to piece himself together. Before he pushes the self-destruct button, to slowly destroy every piece of him that ever was.

Here at the start, before he wakes up in a basement in Oklahoma, having forgotten that Steve Rogers ever died.)

His steps rang on the metal floors throughout the hallways of the helicarrier, and eyes came up and followed him like vultures wherever he went. The new HAMMER recruits jeered at his exit, while the former SHIELD agents he led as director did their best not to meet his eyes as he passed through the invasive departure scan. He met Maria Hill at the hangar bays, beside the SHIELD flying car that he’d taken aside and refurbished.

“That was the most humiliating thing I’ve ever experienced in my entire life,” Maria said by way of hello, “and I had to work as your subordinate.”

Tony smiled, and held the door open as Maria took the front seat. “Hill, please. You were perfectly welcome to submit any comments, concerns and complaints at the suggestion box that was conveniently located outside the helicarrier’s cafeteria.”

“Suggestion box,” Maria scoffed, rolling her eyes as Tony took his place in front of the wheel. “It’s a wonder you even lasted so long.”

He clicked in his seat belt. “Not really something that bears thinking about, isn’t it? Time to put this nightmare behind us.”

“If you say so,” she said skeptically. The car started, hovering in place, before smoothly flying out the hangar. The wind flew past them and whipped the fringe of his hair from his face, reminding him he needed a haircut. The helicarrier grew smaller on his side mirror.

“I say so,” he replied, with no real conviction behind the words. This was only the start, and it felt like an ending, but Tony knew better than that, at the very least. Things still had to get much, _much_ worse, before he got to have an ending.


	2. shipbreaking

_The day after he buried Steve’s body, the real one, the one he’d returned to the ice and left in Namor’s care, Tony woke up in his SHIELD quarters with a heaving gasp. The sharp intake of breath was a palpable pain that made him curl inward, draw in his knees to his chest. He pressed the palms of his hands over his eyes, teeth gritted as he tried not to make a sound. A distant part of him made note of his vitals, impersonal numbers scrolling behind his tightly closed eyes via Extremis. Respiration, pulse rate, the desperate palpitation of his myocardium, the mid-systolic beat of blood flowing through the semilunar valves. Heart murmurs. Thump thump thump._

_He wondered if, in their infinite set of possible universes, there was a version of him anywhere that didn’t suffer from heart problems._

_It was difficult to escape a memory when it kept itself insulated in your chest, ensconced in the frame of your ribcage, and harder still when you can replay that memory in your head—pause and rewind, the first bullet shooting cleanly through the shoulder, a second and third through the stomach. Red blooming bright on blue cloth. Red trickling down the courthouse steps._

_Three gunshots. Pause, pause, pause. He’s missing something._

_He tried again, breathing slowly and deeply. The sheets smell like the industrial detergent SHIELD uses for its linens and the air circulated within the helicarrier._

_The Extremis HUD in his brain blinked 4:38 AM. Tony sat upright on the side of the bed, a hand on his temple, and got ready to go to work._

*

“Wipe it?” Pepper asked from behind the console, looking at him from behind the glass window separating her and Maria from the main room of the terminal. “Tony, you’re talking about your damn brain, not some phone that’s on the fritz. What exactly does deleting your hard drive of a brain mean for you?”

The neuroimaging scanners projected topographic reconstructions of his brain on holographic screens, casting a slightly bluish tinge on Pepper’s freckled skin. Maria stood beside her, eyes closed, her hand pinching the bridge of her nose. Tony shifted on his seat at the terminal station, wiring snaking out from where they were attached to the ports on the back of his head. “It’s exactly what it sounds like, Pep. We’re going to upload a program into my cerebellum—the equivalent thing I have for a cerebellum anyway—that will execute a deletion sequence to erase the contents of my brain.”

He turned away, looking down and focusing instead on the RT generator high above his head. “The good news is that everything, all the classified information I was privy to as director of SHIELD, every plan of the armor since the Mark I, everything Osborn wants, will be obliterated—including the only copy of the Superhuman Registration Database.”

Maria spoke up, for the first time since he’d brought them in the lab. “And the bad news, Stark?” she asked, with an exasperation that said she knew the answer already.

“The program...it’ll erase me too,” he said, smiling, a small, forced grin. “The program won’t discriminate between sensitive information Osborn wants and, say, my memory of the first time I rode a bicycle. It’ll gradually course along my brain’s data tree and delete everything, starting from the outermost branches—thoughts, memories, my magnetic personality—all the way down to essential functions like reflexes, or how to breathe. All of it will be gone, until, well...brain death.”

Pepper gasped, and Maria scoffed, before punching her code in to open the door separating the console from the main atrium. She walked up to where he sat in the middle of the room and grabbed him by the lapels.

“Will you listen to yourself? For such a smart guy, you can sure come up with really fucking stupid ideas.”

“I know it’s drastic, Maria, but—”

“It’s not just drastic—this is _primitive_ , Stark!” Maria shouted in his face, a whirlwind of fury and vitriol. “Osborn’s a lunatic, but Spider-man’s been handing his ass back to him since he was a teenager and you’re talking a scorched earth policy for your goddamn _brain_. Potts, back me up here.”

Pepper stood to the side of the doorway, her face twisted in worry. She looked skeptical, but Pepper had always been easier to convince to his side, all too ready to believe in him. But, perhaps confronted with Maria’s fury, this time she said, “Tony, she has a point. Is it really smart to take yourself off the board now, of all times? What if we need you?”

Tony looked at Maria as he replied, his expression grave and serious. “It’s not a choice I’m making lightly, Pepper. I can’t risk Osborn getting his hands on me—getting his hands on what I know.”

“Delete your brain and let Osborn win? I stood behind you with registration and I’ll do it again, but there has got to be another way,” Maria snarled, gritting her teeth.

“Trust me, there isn’t.”

Maria Hill had never been the warmest person, but her glare as she stared him down was pure ice. “You want options? If you’re so worried about Osborn, a gun would be faster and easier,” she said, stepping away to take out her pistol from its holster on the small of her back, and offering it to him, holding out the grip. He heard Pepper gasp “Maria—!” and step forward from the doorway towards them.

“Sometimes bullets do weird things, Hill. There’s no guarantee it’ll destroy all the data in my brain. Information might still be retrievable from my brain matter.” Tony looked at the gun, then back up at Maria. “You honestly think the thought hasn’t crossed my mind?” he said, more surprised than indignant.

Maria snorted and put the gun back in its holster. “I think you’re running away. I get that this whole martyr thing is a thing for you, but you’re not that noble. You don’t see an out to the mess you helped make so you’re taking an exit and we’re gonna have to pick up the pieces,” she said.

Tony frowned at her. “I’ve made a lot of mistakes, and the biggest one I made was never foreseeing that we’d screw up so bad—that I’d screw up so bad—so as to turn myself into a walking, talking liability. But I have a plan, and I’m going to need your help.”

Maria crossed her arms over her chest and scowled. “I’m not going to be complicit in this, Stark. You wanna kill yourself, fine. But leave me out of it, and Potts too. You guys have a history, but she doesn’t owe you this.”

“I’m not doing this to kill myself,” says Tony, sighing while surreptitiously entering several commands to the keyboard on his armrest. “And it’s why the mission I’m giving you is important. I am literally putting my fate in your hands. And Pepper’s too.”

Pepper put an arm on Maria’s shoulders, and spoke in a small voice. “Maria—”

“I don’t have to help Tony Stark kill himself just because he wants to give Nick Fury’s paranoia a run for his money, and neither do you, Pepper,” she said, turning away and walking back to the door. She entered her passcode on the door’s security pad, before—

“Stark, your door is asking me questions.”

“Enter your date of birth,” said Tony flatly. ”Then your social security number. Then whatever your last SHIELD passkey string was.”

A click of the keys as she followed her instructions. “...Your door wants to know if I’m sober.”

He turned away, looking at a scan of his frontal lobe, the neural pathways Extremis had installed glowing bright and artificial. “Old alarm system. Type Y.”

“It’s asking if I’m sure.”

“Type Y.”

“Now it wants to know if I want to ‘execute,’” she said, her voice hard.

Tony closed his eyes. “Type Y.”

The program uploaded, and he grit his teeth against the surge of energy coursing through his brain. It tasted like blood and electricity, a split-second of each nerve ending catching fire as the autolobotomisation sequence came online. As suddenly as it started, the pain stopped. He opened his eyes.

Maria stood at the entrance, looking back over her shoulder as the door swung open. “Stark, did you just trick me into doing whatever it was you needed me to do?”

“I routed the initiation lock onto the security pad,” said Tony. “It’s a two-part decision-execution protocol to make sure this isn't just me making a terrible decision.”

Her jaw twitched as she glared coldly at him. “It’s still a terrible decision and you’re a fucking asshole,” she spat, before she walked away in long, deliberate strides.

Tony sat back on the terminal station chair, shoulders slumping. “Beggars can’t be choosers.”

Pepper sighed and crossed her arms, looking at Maria’s retreating back with trepidation. “You realise the position you've put the both of us in, trusting us like this?” she asked after a pause. She put a hand to the control panel, and her eyes followed the wires and cables connecting from the back of his head, to where they were plugged in to the massive generator descending from the ceiling. The large repulsor node above his head pulsed steadily, like a heartbeat.

He bit back the apology, and instead gave her a small smile. “Worst-case scenarios, Ms. Potts.”

Pepper gave a long-suffering sigh, and began to enter the secondary initiation key on the panel. “Of course, Mr. Stark.”

*

_“Stand down now or I will put you down, sir,” Sharon Carter snarled, fury tightly and precariously reigned in. “You can be director all you want, but you’re not stopping me.”_

_Tony tried to keep his voice as level and nonthreatening as he could, holding up his hands placatingly. “Agent 13, I’m not trying to—I’m trying to explain. Something’s happened and I don’t want you to be ...shocked.”_

_She raised her eyebrows at him, hands on her hips, and it must’ve been only her professionalism that stopped her from socking him one in the head. “Shocked? Director, you sneak his body out of the hospital last night without telling me and now you won’t tell me_ why _, exactly?”_

_“You know we couldn't have left his body there in the hospital,” he said, keeping his voice neutral. “He’s the only perfect super-soldier specimen in the world.”_

_Tony didn’t think it was possible for her face to hold much more contempt than it currently did, but he was wrong. Her words rang loud and clear in the enclosed space of the hallway, metal walls all around them. “He was your friend, Tony,” she said, jabbing a finger angrily at his face. “Don’t call him a specimen.”_

_“You know that’s not what I meant, Sharon.”_

_“Tony…” she replied, sounding less angry and more unsure for the first time since she confronted him. “What’s happened to him?”_

_That simple question was harder than having to face her accusations, he discovered. “I don’t know,” he answered._

_He then turned around, and keyed in his code on the wall to open the door leading down to the lower levels of the helicarrier. Without a word, he moved forward, the order to follow left unsaid. They walked in tense silence through the corridors, his sharp stride almost mechanical, hers following cautiously behind his steps, until they reached the morgue. The light shone down from the ceiling, harsh and bright and sterile, gleaming bright on the tiled walls. The air was sour with the smell of alcohol and disinfectant._

_On the metal slab in the middle of the room was Steve’s body, the wounds on his shoulder and stomach scabbed over with blood, his lower half covered by a white sheet. His arms were spread wide open, and each line of his ribs was clearly defined. His corpse was emaciated, as though his muscles had atrophied overnight, clinging to his still large frame._

_To his right, he heard Sharon let out a pained gasp. Tony took a deep breath, and slumped slightly against the wall. He was tired, but he was always tired nowadays. The current situation just didn’t help any._

_“My god. What’s...what’s wrong with him?”_

_“Our best guess, until we get the lab reports back, is that the effects of the serum reversed when he died,” he said, as clinically as he could manage. He was careful to keep the mortuary slab in the periphery of his vision, to not look at the body directly. "We don't know what happened, why his body reverted back. This is a recent development," he explained, choosing to omit the reasons for how he knew that. Tony may be a terrible director, but even he knew he wouldn't inspire any votes of confidence explaining how he knew Steve—how he knew the body had looked fine just yesterday._

_(Yesterday, when he had allowed himself a moment of selfishness and weakness, a confession he waited too long to say, until it was too late. Four words running through his head like a mantra.)_

_Sharon held a hand up to her mouth, and whispered something to herself that Tony didn't quite hear in his own distraction._

_“What did you say?”_

_She turned towards him, her eyes suddenly wide, wild with fear and anger. “I—what did you do to him?”_

_“Sharon, I just told you. You can’t…you can’t think I would do this...” he trailed off, his expression falling. “You can’t think I wanted any of this.”_

_“Can’t I?” she replied, her words shaking slightly. “You’re suddenly running SHIELD, while Steve is—” She cut off, as though she couldn’t bear to say the words aloud._

_“Damn it, I was trying to do the right thing. I was trying to save us from this.”_

_“To hell with your good intentions! He was your_ friend _, Tony.”_

_"And you think this isn't killing me, seeing him like this?" he asked. To his own ears, his words sounded high and desperate. They came out wrong, too honest by far, because he was director and he could not let his own agents see how fragile it all is, the way he's barely holding himself together._

_He was almost grateful for the slap, when it came. Sharon struck him, forcing his head back, pain blooming on his jaw. He brought a hand up to his face, where the skin was tingling with the force of her blow._

_Sharon was a taut bowstring, hands clenched tightly into fist. Her eyes shone with angry tears as she spoke through gritted teeth. "You're not allowed to say that, Stark."_

_(She's right. This is not about you.)_

_"Sharon, I—"_

_"No,” she cut him off before he could say anything further. She walked to the mortuary entrance, stopping at the doorway for her last words._

_“Consider this my official resignation, Director,” she said, and left, leaving him to be alone with a corpse._

*

The secret underground lab at Funtime Inc. would not have been Tony’s first choice as the battle station of what would probably be his last, if not so valiant, stand. No, it was nothing close to his lab back in Avengers Tower, but he was want for a lot of things, and this lab had all the tools he needed. There was only the dimmest lighting illuminating the terminal station, dull white, clinical and perfunctory, glowing alongside news feed projections and the holograms of his own brain.

Pepper had left hours ago for the main Stark Industries office in Long Island, and he wished he’d been able to give her a better parting gift than the smoking remains of his company, awaiting her signature to liquidate the rest of it, but at least he had managed to do the hard part. The expenses of putting down SI was a considerable toll even for him—the brunt of it had been arranging severance packages for all the thousands of SI employees who now found themselves out of a job, and if at some point he had use his own money to cover those expenses, well, he always prided himself on being an okay boss.

Mostly okay, anyway. The Rescue armor wouldn't make up for everything he’d put Pepper through, but he thought that was a pretty good severance package. He hoped she would like it.

Tony was alone in the lab, prepping the next sequence in the deletion process and mapping out his journey. He typed on the keyboard as he absentmindedly took a drink of this coffee, before grimacing at the taste. It was cold, and there were dregs of coffee grounds at the bottom. He must’ve forgotten to put in a filter. He must’ve forgotten he made this coffee hours ago.

The autolobotomization process was in full swing, which made the planning a little harder than it should’ve been.

Perhaps more than anything, it was the little things he was already forgetting that scared him most, things like how to make good coffee, or what the weather was like in France this time of year. He tried to remember similarly small things, like how Pepper took her coffee (black with sugar?), and instead ended up at the realisation that he could no longer remember the color of his mother’s eyes.

He leaned back in his chair, and put a hand to his temple.

There’s a noise of a commotion behind him, before a voice called out, “Tony, I—”

He turned around on instinct, swiveling in his chair to fire a repulsor at the entrance to the lab. Maria ducked out of the way as the wall behind her was hit, leaving a black scorch mark where she'd been standing just a moment ago.

"Fucking hell, Stark!"

"Christ, Maria—ever heard of calling ahead? I almost blew your head off," he said, heart still racing, and in spite of his words, his voice was half-surprised, half-apologetic. "What are you doing here?" he asked, coming up to the doorway to help Maria to her feet.

She pushed his hand away and helped herself up, brushing dust off the front of her shirt. "Sorry, boss. Bit busy running for my life on the way here."

Maria held up her handcuffed wrists, and now that she looked up, Tony could see the ugly bruise over her eye, the skin mottled purple and blue. "Listen close, because this is the last time you'll hear these words coming from me, but your paranoid ass was right. There were HAMMER agents positioned at the door of my apartment when I got home, waiting to ambush me."

"Were you followed here?"

She fixed him with an incendiary glare that he suspected could make him catch fire as well as any of his repulsor shots could if only she kept it trained on him long enough. "They captured me and I gave them the slip by incapacitating my guards and crashing the transport plane into the ocean."

He blinked, sitting back down in his chair. He pulled up news feeds on one of the floating computer screens around them and...yep, there it was, a press release announcing a warrant for Maria Hill for 'resisting arrest'. They both stared at the footage a while longer, the absurdity of the situation equal parts hilarious and terrifying. They were on the run from Norman Osborn.

"Well...thank god you're alright," he said lamely as he undid her handcuffs. She replied with a begrudging expression of gratitude and rubbed at her reddened wrists, then leaned back against the wall.

"We got a trigger-happy psychopath and his army of hired grunts on our tail. So what's next, boss?”

Tony pulled out the keyboard and began to type, though he shot her sideways glances even as he did so. “Weren't you just yelling at me about my plan a several hours ago?”

Maria rolled her eyes, but only a little. “You want me to tell you how you were right again or what? You were a terrible director and I never should’ve worked for you, but I’m gonna follow your orders because you’re the only sane person left still giving them."

"That's incredibly encouraging to hear, Maria."

“Anytime. So what can I help you with?”

He pulled up an image on the screen, a plain-looking office building alongside GPS coordinates. "Well, there's no time to lose. I need you to go to Texas for me."

Maria looked bewildered at the non sequitur, as though worried that Tony was trying to contradict her earlier words. "Why? And where in Texas?"

"Austin. It's the location of an SI subsidiary called FuturePharm. I have something there that I need you to pick up for me."

"Pick up—what am I, your courier?" she asked, crossing her arms over her chest.

"It's important," he said, holding out a USB drive to Maria.

She snatched the proffered drive from his hand. "Alright, what's waiting for me in Austin, Texas that's so important you need me to get it?"

"A hard drive. It's going to be one of about...maybe ten, fifteen thousand arrayed on site. Break in to the main terminal, plug that drive in, and it'll give you directions on which one to take."

He turned and looked at her straight in the eye with as much seriousness as he could muster. "You get the hard drive, and make sure to deliver it to Captain America. Bucky Barnes. You should be able to find a way to contact him through Black Widow."

She scoffed, but pocketed the drive even as she said, "I’d like to have it on record that I still think this is a shitty plan. Why not rendezvous with the Avengers? You're already on the run, and they've been wanted since back when you were in charge."

"You think they're gonna wanna work with me after everything I did to them?" he asked skeptically.

Maria shrugged. "Enemy of my enemy. If you tell them what you're going through, they’d choose to put your quarrels aside. What about Danvers? Rhodes?"

"I don't want to compromise them by pulling them into this. They have problems enough of their own.”

"But weren't you just telling me that if you get captured, it'll be everyone’s problems?" she said.

"Yes, but I only need your help, Hill. The point is to limit the collateral damage as much as possible."

She glared for a moment, before turning away in a concession of defeat. “At least you’re not Osborn.”

“Again with the ringing endorsement.”

"What about Pepper? Aren't you worried about Pepper being so out in the open?"

"I left her a little something," he said, purposefully vague.

"Oh, that’s helpful."

"The less I share my plans with you, the less you’d be in danger."

"Didn't you hear Osborn? I'm a danger to society. I was accused on public television of colluding with the fucking _Skrulls_."

As if on cue, their conversation is interrupted by an incoming broadcast alert caught by one of Tony’s network feelers. The screens around them flickered to life with a live feed, the camera focused on a crowd gathered around a podium, occupied by none other than Osborn himself.

Beside him, he heard Maria curse and mutter under her breath. “Speak of the bloody devil.”

The news ticker on the bottom of the screens informed them that the broadcast was coming in live from Restoration Park, the Director of HAMMER having assembled the press corp for an important announcement. But Tony found it hard to focus on those relevant details, when he realised what Osborn was wearing and why it had looked so familiar.

Osborn welcomed the assembled audience, hands gripping the podium, wearing an armor he made, painted over with a garish red, blue and white colour scheme.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the global press—I’m here today for two important developments on HAMMER’s war on terror. Firstly, I am honored to unveil the Iron Patriot armor, worn by yours truly. This was not only a tactical decision on part of HAMMER as part of its bold initiative in the fight to uphold national security, but also a symbolic olive branch and commemoration of the late Captain America,” he said, smiling wide as the camera bulbs flickered around him. “We are here to uphold the principles and values the good Captain represented, and invite those who wish to honor his memory to support me and HAMMER.”

He paused for effect, and waved a magnanimous hand as reporters began to shout questions at him. “But I’m afraid I am also here on matters of a more somber nature,” he said, wearing an expression of sudden solemnity. “As of 1400 Eastern Standard Time, I announce the official warrant for the arrest of Anthony Edward Stark for crimes against humanity, collusion with an alien menace, flight from justice, conspiracy, criminal neglect, and treason against the planet Earth. We have reason to believe he is already attempting to escape justice, with his right-hand woman Maria Hill resisting arrest and fleeing—”

The broadcast continued, as Osborn went into the details of his supposed crimes and HAMMER’s aggressive campaigns to make sure he was brought to justice. Tony was fixated on the screen with nauseated fascination. It was surreal, watching a real life supervillain declaring him a fugitive.

“Well, it’s official,” said Maria, leaning her hip back against the table. “You’re now public enemy number one.”

Tony wanted to laugh, and so he did, a little, a small laugh that to his own ears bordered on quiet hysteria. “I’m going to find Osborn and make him pay for this.”

Maria smirked approvingly, feral and dangerous. “Get in line.”

There were all the other details he should focus on, like HAMMER’s assault on SI holdings throughout the world, but the worst of it wasn't even that Osborn was wearing armor he had built. No, the worst was that he was wearing Steve’s colors, and that was what made Tony want to kill him most of all.

Killing had always been something to be avoided if possible, utilised only as a final resort. But now his blood curdled with a murderous rage and fervor he rarely felt, the unadulterated desire to rip apart another human being with his bare hands.

“I am at the very front of the line, Hill. I’ll leave some of him left that you could beat up.”

She waved a dismissive hand, and turned for the door. “I’ll be fine with a corpse left to piss on, at this point.”

On the screen, Osborn was now fielding questions from the press and that made him wonder—when people had fought him back during the war, did they see Tony the same way everyone saw Osborn now? It should’ve been insulting, how readily people accepted his actions as anything so easy and simple as a power grab. Maybe he should’ve been angrier that they could think that of him, that they could look between him and Osborn’s mustache twirling and see no virtual difference between the two.

Had they thought so little of him that they believed his sacrificing everything he had was worth something as petty as winning? Heavy was the head that wore the crown, and people had no trouble thinking that Tony wanted all of it.

Well, he’d always been a very good liar. No sense in being angry that some people bought his bullshit.

“I’m not staying cooped up in here long, and I’m guessing you won’t be either,” said Maria, her back turned to him, one hand gripping the edge of the doorway as she looked over her shoulder.

“No,” said Tony, “I’m blowing this place up the moment I leave, and then I’m running like hell.”

“I’m finding your drive, and then I’m finding Captain fucking America, because you asked. So remember what you promised,” she said, adding, “You can’t make Osborn pay if you’re dead.”

“Be careful, Hill.”

Maria nodded. “Don’t die, Stark,” she said, and disappeared through the doorway, leaving Tony alone with the feed of his warrant announcement. He closed his eyes and let out a weary sigh, before he shut off the console with a click.

*

_Tony strode down the corridor of the helicarrier, and Maria walked alongside him to his right, Jasper Sitwell to his left. Sitwell was rattling off a report as they walked on the Fifty-State Initiative— forty-one teams so far were registered and active, which put them in better shape than Tony had expected them to be at this point. With Extremis, he accessed the report Rhodey sent him earlier that morning from Camp Hammond in Stamford, Connecticut, where he was helping oversee the recruitment training program for superhuman cadets._

_It was a couple of moments before he noticed that Sitwell had stopped mid-sentence and fallen behind a couple of steps. Tony turned around, where Sitwell was standing in place, looking mildly confused._

_“Something wrong, Agent?”_

_“I...nothing, Director. Are you okay?”_

_Tony blinked. “Why wouldn't I be?”_

_Sitwell looked as though he would be fidgeting_ _in place if not for his training and professionalism. He shot a quick but meaningful glance at Maria, who gave him a minute nod. “I was just inquiring, Sir,” he said flatly._

_“I’m fine, Sitwell. Thank you for your concern. Find Dugan and relay the full report to him,” he said tiredly._

_Sitwell saluted him wordlessly and walked away, after which Tony turned to Maria. “What was that all about?”_

_Maria looked at him skeptically, her mouth turning. “That was the first time Sitwell saw you accessing Extremis. You are aware of how disconcerting it looks, right?”_

_“Extremis?”_

_She leaned against the wall of the corridor, one eyebrow raised. “Your face turns expressionless, and your eyes go blank and blur like static when you use Extremis. It’s creepy, especially if you were seeing it for the first time like Sitwell had,” she explained matter-of-factly and, after a pause, added as an afterthought, “sir.”_

_“I was just reading the Initiative report against the missive that came in from Camp Hammond yesterday,” Tony said. Maria frowned, as though she wanted to say something further, but decided to bite back her comment at the last minute._

_“I’m fine, Commander Hill,” he repeated, turning around to continue on his way to the Director’s office._

_“Of course, Director,” she replied after the smallest pause, and the click of her boots in step with his told Tony that she was following._


	3. ashes and snow

The compound self-destructed behind him with a minimum amount of fanfare, but no amount of contained demolition was going to prevent HAMMER’s satellites from detecting the destruction of Funtime, Inc. As long as the only thing they would find when they go to investigate was the twisted metal and mangled scrapheap of his old inventions, Tony didn't mind so much. Nothing would be recoverable. He was very good at burning bridges.

Los Angeles was his first stop. Henry Hellrung was kneeling at a wooden pew when Tony came in the small church where he led his AA meetings. Tony kept his head down as the somber-faced attendees filed out, baseball cap pulled tight over his eyes, dressed casually in a pair of jeans and an unfashionable bomber jacket. He had shaved his face and cut his hair short, so none of them looked at him twice, but it was only a matter of time before HAMMER was able to recognize the energy signature of the armor on the roof.

Anyway, it wasn’t much of a disguise against an old friend, his former sponsor. Henry stood up and turned around when he registered Tony standing by the thick oaken doors, shoulders slumped, hands hidden in his pockets. With his brown hair a little longer since the last time he’d seen him, Henry looked more like Tony Stark than Tony did at the moment, though his face was also clean-shaven; he only ever sported the goatee when he was playing Iron Man on the small screen. The deletion program had eaten away the memories Tony had of the actual TV show—among the first that had been discarded, given how superfluous they were, but he remembered that he had always thought Henry’s face was too kind for the role.

“I barely recognised you,” he said, as he came forward to hug Tony, looking both miserable and relieved to see him.

“That was mostly the point, Henry. Seen the news, I imagine?”

Henry nodded, his expression serious. “Osborn’s been broadcasting your wanted poster day and night. Anyone with half a brain doesn't believe a word of it, of course.”

“Which is a smaller percentage of the population than you’d think.”

“Tony, I worked in media and entertainment before even becoming a superhero. Propaganda’s just one of the tricks of the trade,” Henry said, followed by a strained smile. “Although admittedly, political sabotage is above my pay-grade.”

“Well, conspiracy against the human race is above all of our pay-grade, but Osborn doesn't have any qualms about embellishing my resume.”

Henry leaned back, his hip resting against the side of pew. “I take it you’re not here in a house of prayer to complain about Osborn though. Confession, maybe? But you've never been a religious man.”

“Neither are you, really.”

“God’s okay with prayers from a couple of alcoholics.”

Tony took off the baseball hat and ran a hand over his unfamiliar shorn hair. “I just came by to say...well, I’m not going to be making it to some meetings for a while. Possibly quite a long while. I mean, I've not been going for a couple of years, but I felt it...necessary, to give you a heads up this time around.”

“A while, huh,” Henry said.

“Yes. A long, long while. Probably.”

Henry didn't reply immediately, and was instead looking down at the floor, where the dull carpet was scuffed smooth by the footsteps of countless churchgoers. His eyes still averted, he spoke. “Are you sure you have to do what you’re doing? Is this last resort of yours the only option?”

“Even if it wasn't, it’s too late for me to go back now.”

“Ever think of just turning yourself in? You’re too big for them to just...make you disappear. You’re too well-known, and you’re friends with people like Thor, and…” he trailed off uncertainly.

“Henry, you know better than to think anyone’s too big to disappear. If you have the right people angry with you, it doesn't leave you with a whole lotta options.”

“Then why did you even come here? People...people need this place. It’s a sanctuary, and all you've done is paint a bullseye on the door.”

Tony flinched, but Henry had always been an honest guy. One of the many ways he was a better man than him. “I know. I know. There’s an armor on the roof that I had to recover, and in which I’ll be making my get-away. I dropped a cashier’s check for two million dollars in the collection box when I came in, and it’s not going to be enough of an apology when HAMMER’s guys come kicking through the door to interrogate you about me about ten minutes from now. When they do, just...just tell them everything. Don’t try to protect me.”

“Doesn't seem like anyone’s protecting you any at all.”

“Gotta solve problems on my own, once in a while.”

Henry smiled. “That’s antithetical to my whole job description, you realise.”

“I know. I can’t give up while I know people haven’t given up on me,” Tony replied, his expression serious. “Whatever this looks like, I’m not giving up.”

Henry stood up straight and hugged him again, tighter than before, his eyes shut tight. “The door’s always open.”

“See you around, Henry.”

*

With Tony’s going-away present still eating through HAMMER’s operating systems, there wasn't much interception as he went from station to hidden station. Thanks to his (now truly well-justified) paranoia, there were a lot of them, dotted all over the world and known only to him. He flew his way north, along the Pacific coastline but staying away from the airspace of the larger metropolises, not stopping until he was over rural British Columbia, somewhere in the Coast Mountains. Leaves crunched underfoot as he made his way into this particular outpost, hidden away underground among thick deciduous forests. This wasn't one of his more well-equipped stations since he rarely found occasion to visit it, but it had been the closest one he was certain wasn't compromised, and the only stop he had until he got past the Bering Strait, into Siberia.

The lights in this compound didn't turn on when he flicked the switch, so he left the hatch-door open to let the dying light of late afternoon stream in. Everything was covered in a layer of dust, but the computer generator was still working, all systems registering full functionality as he sat down in front of the terminal and brought it online. With the repulsor node shining bright above him, there was more than enough light to see with to connect the proper wires to the ports on the back of his neck.

The numb surge of current left an after-taste of ozone in the back of his mouth and a dull sensation in his head, as though his skull was overstuffed with cotton. He shuddered weakly, because even if he didn't know the process was literally deleting parts of himself, it was still incredibly uncomfortable. The fact that he was entirely cognizant of its purpose for the hour or so it took to engage the deletion program was just an added cherry on top. He let his head fall forward on the console, resting on his forearms. Down to 86% and counting.

It wasn't until he heard the clunk of heavy armored footsteps outside that he thought that maybe leaving the door open wasn't such a good idea.

He sprang to his feet, wires still connected to the back of his head. He’d taken off the armor when he came in, but a hand repulsor was in arm’s reach and he put it on just in time to aim at the hatchway and fire at the glint of gunmetal.

“Woah, woah! I’m a friendly!” shouted back a familiar voice, and Tony let out a breath he didn’t know he was holding.

“Why does everyone keep trying to sneak up on me?”

“Didn't think I could sneak up on you, Boss,” replied Rhodey, moving down the rungs of the short ladder before standing on the floor with a clunk. He took off the helmet of the War Machine and held it under one arm.

Tony lowered his hand. “Are you here with anyone?” he asked belatedly. Even if it was Rhodey, he couldn't drop his guard, at least not immediately.

“No, I’m alone.”

“How did you find me?”

“You’re wearing older gear, so it was much easier to track you down after Henry contacted me. He called right after he got out of HAMMER custody and told me you came to say goodbye. Then he asked me to make sure you don’t do anything stupid,” Rhodey said, smiling ruefully. “I told him that’s beyond even my considerable capabilities. But here I am doing just that.”

“You sure you don’t have Osborn tailing you?”

“He had a couple of drones on me, but they were fooled by a bogey decoy. HAMMER thinks I’m en route to New York. Props to my tech support, of course.”

Tony sank back down to his seat, and rubbed his forehead tiredly. He remembered that particular upgrade at least.

“So what’s your plan, Tony? You’re not looking too good.”

“Well, I need to move out, and you need to get as far away from me as possible.”

Rhodey made a noise of protest. “You don’t have to do everything alone. I came to help—”

“I can’t have Osborn thinking we’re colluding together.”

“I’m not on HAMMER’s damn payroll.”

“But I can’t have them thinking you’re on mine,” Tony replied. Visiting Henry had been a risk, but he was a civilian. Rhodey, however, was right under HAMMER’s purview, being an active superhero and all. There was no end of trouble that he could get into if Osborn thought they were working together.

Rhodey glared at him, and took several steps forward, until he was right in front of Tony. He set the helmet on the console and put his armored hands on Tony’s shoulders. “How long do you expect to keep out of Osborn’s hands? He’s directed most of HAMMER solely to finding you and it’s just a matter of time. Tony, they’re desperate, and when they find you, they’ll kill you.”

“I have a plan, and it’s going just about as well as I expected.”

“The way Henry explained it made it sound like you’re angling for a death wish. I just know I’m not gonna like the reason for why there are wires coming out the back of your head, or why you're using old armor.”

Tony thought over his possible responses, before going with, “Probably not.”

Rhodey’s expression looked pained, obviously having realised he wasn't going to get much more of an explanation than that. “But it’s important?”

“Vital."

“I could help,” Rhodey repeated, in a manner that made it clear he wasn't going to budge on this point.

Tony wracked through his mind, because Rhodey was hard to dissuade once he was set on a particular course of action, and he didn't think any of his reasons would go over well. ‘ _I need to delete my brain_ ’ was very difficult to explain without sounding exactly as suicidal as Rhodey suspected, so he needed a better alternative.

“I need to stall for time. I need time,” he finally said.

A beat, in which Rhodey just looked at him with a contemplative expression. “Alright.”

“Alright?”

“I trust you.”

“You trust me?” Tony asked, with a note of disbelief in his voice.

“What are you, a parrot?”

“No, it’s just—” he started, before trailing off. What could he say? He was expecting much more resistance than this.

Rhodey seemed to have gotten the question anyway. “Your decisions got us this far,” he said.

“Don’t remind me.”

“I can redirect Osborn’s attentions from you to finish whatever the hell you’re doing.”

Tony's protests were immediate. “But he’ll catch you and—”

“He’ll do nothing. War Machine can replicate the armor signature once I’m back in American airspace. His sensors will think I’m you, until he catches me and I plead innocent. He doesn't know that our armors don’t typically have the same energy signature and I’m a fully registered superhero—can’t arrest me if I'm doing nothing wrong,” he said.

Tony was unsure. “But still…”

“You can’t tell me not to help you,” Rhodey said stubbornly, and he was certain he'd heard this before. Maybe not the particular memory, but this was a part of himself that hadn't been entirely deleted yet. An old friend’s trust. As Rhodey hugged him and took off back to the skies, all Tony could think about was about how much he was going to hate forgetting that.

*

Moving from point to point, onward and upward. Except, not really. The deletion process was regression down his own development history. Downgrading through old models of the armor as his cognitive processes became more and more limited, simpler.

The Mark V had been set on autopilot, several hours into Russian airspace, when Tony was woken from a shallow sleep by sudden turbulence, the armor’s flight jerking erratically. He shook his head to full wakefulness, to note the flickering warning signal on the HUD, when a disembodied voice spoke all of sudden, out of nowhere.

“That’s some old armor you got on, Shellhead.”

As if on cue, the thrusters went dead, and thrust him into free-fall.

He’d forgotten something important, and wasn't that the theme of his life lately.

The Mark V...the armor wasn't built for sustained flight at these temperatures. This far north, against the Russian cold, It was enough freeze the circuits routing power to the thrusters if exposed long enough. It was a problem he’d dealt with in later iterations of the armor, but he’d forgotten this crucial detail, didn't plan for it because his brain had erased the information, and now the HUD was blinking red, warning, warning, he was losing altitude fast—

No, he didn't forget. His brain had tried to remind him of it, last minute, like it had done so before. He rerouted all power to the boot thrusters, trying to break through the icing and slow his descent. The rockets came to life, sputtering weakly on and off for several, gut-churning hundred foot drops at a time. It was no time at all before the faint outlines below him solidified into trees and empty roads and landscape. About thirty feet off the ground, the thrusters sputtered one last time before completely dying, and he braced his arms in front of his head for impact. He crash-landed deep into a snowbank, sinking into the hard earth beneath, displacing the snow about him in a thick flurry.

The collision wasn't as bad as it could've been, but it was enough to leave him winded for a good couple of minutes. After a few moments, having determined he didn't have any injuries save a some very sporting bruises, he sat upright. The HUD was still offline, and without it he couldn't see anything around him, couldn't register anything except the darkness and his own shallow breathing.

“System update...system? Hello?”

“Systems rebooting,” replied the robotic voice of the armor.

He groaned as he got to his knees. “Alright,” he said, undoing the manual clasps around his neck and taking off the helmet. He looked around, and in every direction for miles around was just a blank expanse of white.  “Take your time.”

“Systems rebooting,” it repeated.

*

When human body temperature falls below thirty-five degrees Celsius, the erratic function of the body’s regular homeostatic mechanisms manifests in a variety of symptoms. With the onset of hypothermia comes excitation of the sympathetic nervous system—muscle contractions, tachypnea, vasoconstriction. Prolonged exposure to cold exacerbates these symptoms as regular cellular metabolic processes shut down. If he didn't keep moving, his muscles would forget how to move, and it would be so easy to just stop, as though the snow was calling to him, lulling him to blank, dreamless sleep.

These were all things he still remembered. This was information his brain thought he couldn't yet discard. But alongside them were faces in his mind that he could no longer match up to names, words that held no meaning, equations he no longer understood, had forgotten why they were beautiful. Deletion was a slow, arduous process—death by a thousand cuts, and it _was_ death, because what was Tony Stark without his famous brain? It was a level of self-destruction that was impressive even for him.

He shivered in the armor. His heart rate was a slow, low thrumming against his loud, labored breathing. Dead trees loomed in the foreground, thin ash-black limbs shooting out of the ground like the claws of some huge sinister beast.

“Keep walking,” he muttered under his breath. “Keep walking or you’re dead.”

He was in the outskirts of Kirensk, in the middle of nowhere, but at least there was no danger of him being spotted by anyone. The armor’s flight capabilities were still dead after he landed so disastrously, and there was no way of fixing them without proper tools, a workshop. He was able to recover limited display functions and the armor’s GPS system, which told him he needed to walk on foot some fifteen miles further south to the next station. With the snow encumbering every step, he was going at a snail’s pace, but there was nothing to be done except to keep going.

The Mark V was familiar, reliable, but without working hydraulics it manoeuvred like an old tank, especially in comparison to the armors he’d grown used to. It was dead-weight around his limbs, but at least it kept the worst of the freezing temperature out. Still, he wasn't used to armor weighing this much, weighing anything like it did in its earlier incarnations—he'd almost forgotten how heavy it used to be. How cumbersome it had become, before Extremis.

Extremis saved him, Extremis made him better, and Extremis was the source of all his troubles.

There were footsteps trudging alongside him in the snow, but he knew there was no one there, really. He theorised that it was ghost code, the deletion sequence tracing along the biointerface Extremis left behind and making it act up. It was a weird sensation, a distinct hyper-awareness that there were parts of him slowly being deleted. The knowledge of absence, but not of what was lost. The constant feeling of having forgotten something important.

He passed a massive boulder, and a man with a boxer’s build lying on a hospital bed, the monitor beeping audibly beside him. In the far distance, there was a woman with long black hair whipping about her face as she leaned back against a motorcycle, obscuring her carefree smile.

He walked, one foot in front of the other, each footfall burying deep in the snow. He passed a red and blue disc with a white star at its center, embedded in a snowbank.

He blinked and the shield disappeared.

When the Skrulls had invaded and their virus had fried the Extremis program out of his system, he lost access to the new abilities the Extremis had given him. The whole Starktech dataspine was corrupted, rendered inaccessible. He was no longer able to directly communicate with digital systems, no more mid-level technopathy, though some of the physiological changes remained. The cybernetic interface of his brain, the carbon nanotubes in the hollow of his bones were all still there, unusable since the armor was expunged from his body.

The visions had gone too, when he lost Extremis. It had been one of the few things he'd been grateful for, the fact that he no longer had to watch out for grim images at the corner of his eyes, tricks of the light that disappeared when he blinked. It had been the way his brain compartmentalised the amount of information it was forced to handle, bytes upon terabytes of data that had been simply impossible for his still all too human processors to fully digest. So information sublimated itself into his unconscious, excess data settling in the parts of his brain other people reserved for guilt and memory. But sometimes it was still too much, so the data organised itself into forms he could comprehend, into visual, olfactory, auditory manifestations. Hallucinations.

Ghosts, and all of them had names.

Happy Hogan. Sal Kennedy. Young Lucy Cervantes, who admired Iron Man and signed up with the Nebraskan Initiative team. Information and his own subconscious thoughts mingling together and surfacing in urgency, to point out details that were right in front of him, just buried under too much data for him to figure out himself.

(It was a data storage error; his brain seemed to have such an endless capacity for regret.)

When he lost the Extremis, the visions had gone away, and it had been the one thing he was grateful to lose. But the neurocircuits were still there in his brain, hardwired as they were by the Extremis. And in the midst of the deletion process, sparks ran through old circuits, jump-starting dead wiring. Random synapses of his brain firing to replay old film, before being burned out of existence.

“Tony, Tony, Tony,” said a voice to his right. He turned to see Rumiko smiling at him, looking like bright summer in her yellow dress, a splash of color in this wasteland of snow and ice, and Tony could barely breathe for the corporeality of her image. “You've forgotten something.“

_What am I forgetting?_

_Tell me?_

"That's cheating, Tony.”

_Wasn't the whole point of all this to forget?_

“Oh, honey. Your reasons aren't that selfish.”

He shook his head as if to clear it, and Rumiko disappeared.

_...Who?_

Sparks from the dying throes of his memory, restarting old neural pathways, and the visions returned.

*

_Tony held Rumiko his arms, and there was blood trickling out of her mouth, and she was still breathing, and she was trying to speak—_

_"Shh, shh," he said, "save your strength, please, you'll be okay—"_

_She couldn't go, he was gonna propose, and he hadn't told her about that book yet, that book that reminded her of him for just a brief moment. Just one moment that made him decide, that let him realise he would be happy to spend the rest of his life with her._

_"I'm sorry," she said._

_He put his forehead to hers, his body shaking with quiet sobs. She was still warm. "This is an illusion. This isn't real. This is a nightmare. This is a nightmare."_

_He closed his eyes. "Please wake up," he whispered into her hair._

_"Please let me wake up."_

*

“Prolonged exposure to cold is dangerous, Tony,” said a voice from behind him.

Tony gritted his teeth, and resolved not to answer.

A familiar good-natured laugh rang out, as though they’d just shared a joke. “What’s changed, Tony? That big computer brain of yours not clever enough for some witty reply?”

He had ways to go yet, but the cold must be getting to him. He stepped forward, putting one foot in front of the other, sinking deep into the snow. His right foot lodged itself into the ground, and he faltered forward. It was a particularly bad moment of disorientation, and for a second he forgot what he was doing and why he was there. He panicked, the freezing cold suddenly burning on his skin as he fell to his knees. He gasped, and threw off the helmet to breathe.

He was still on his knees, when Steve appeared, standing right in front of him as though to block his path. He's wearing full Cap regalia, though the cowl was pulled down and the shield was nowhere to be seen. If Steve had been the type of person to stand casually by slouching and putting his hands in his pockets, that would be his current bearing. Instead, he just tilted his head to the side and stood in place, as nonchalantly as a man with Steve's background and training ever could.

No, it wasn't Steve, but Tony had a particularly vivid imagination.

He still remembered the first time Steve's hallucination appeared to him this clearly, as more than whispers. It had been back when he was still Director, fighting the Mandarin. It had been a dream, alone in Stark Tower, when Steve appeared to him, silhouetted against the glass. In alarm, Tony had instinctively summoned the gold undersuit, fired a repulsor shot at the hallucination, and Steve dodged, and rammed him through a wall. Steve had wrapped one hand around his throat and pulled him to his feet, and Tony could still remember his own fear, and anger, and hopeful disbelief, as vividly as if it had been a real memory instead of just a dream. He was there as a warning. _The writing is Malukkian_ , he'd said.

The first time Steve had appeared to him like this, the hand had wrapped around his throat, warm and almost-real.

“Did you forget why you’re doing this, Tony?” This Steve’s voice was neutral, not scathing or accusatory as Tony thought it should be, more curious than anything. There’s a coldness to his voice that matched their surroundings, but sounded entirely wrong coming from Steve. He should never sound so detached or unconcerned.

Perhaps that was why Tony wasn't caught so off-guard this time, why he was immediately certain this was a hallucination. Why there was no desperate hope that this was really Steve, come back from the dead. In their line of work, the possibility wasn't wholly ridiculous, or even unlikely. Steve had done it once before, after all. Maybe he’ll do it again. Maybe if Steve was an X-Man, Tony thought.

In their line of work, death was crushing and meaningless and a far too frequent companion. There’s nothing he could trust, nothing he could do to squash out that persistent thought in the back of his head, that perhaps Steve might come back after all, and fix everything. There was nothing reassuring about that thought, that uncertainty—it was assurance that no one could ever move on entirely, an insidious spark of hope that kept grief alive. Tony wondered who could ever think he needed any help in that department.

But in this case, this was just his mind playing tricks on him as only Tony Stark’s brain could, unreliable and fanciful and _showy_ even in its dying throes. He’d wept in front of the corpse of the man that stood before him, so it was going to take more than this to convince him that one of his greatest hopes had come true. Tony was a lot of things, but optimistic had never been one of them.

Mirages were for deserts and searing heat, not the white, biting cold. Mirages were promises of salvation.

“Am I supposed to talk back to you?” Tony asked. “Do I need to? You can hear everything in my head.”

Steve shrugged, and the motion looked out of place on his person. “There’s no etiquette for this kind of thing.”

“Are you here to help me?”

“I’m here to remind you. You’re forgetting things.”

Tony sighed. “My subconscious couldn't have chosen a better delegate?”

Steve stepped forward, until he was right in front of Tony. He crouched down to be at eye-level with him, resting back on his heels as he leaned forward right into Tony's space. There’s no depression in the snow where his weight should be sinking, but Tony felt the hand gripping his chin as real as the cold wind whipping around him. Steve tilted his face up, looking him squarely in the eye.

“You have to remember what you’re doing.”

“Are you going to hurt me?” he asked. There was no sense of protest in the words, just a simple question as to ask what would come next.

Steve didn’t immediately reply, just kept his gaze, boring straight into Tony’s eyes. “You can’t let Osborn have the database, Tony,” he finally said.

Tony closed his eyes, and even though he no longer saw the blue eyes staring right into him, he still felt the gloved hand, the rough, worn leather on his jaw. “I’m slowly losing every part of me.”

“Do you want to lose me?”

“I’ve lost you already.”

The hand dropped away from his face, but Tony kept his eyes shut. He braced his hands where he knelt on the ground, and pulled himself to his feet.

“Remember what you killed me for.”

The universe was nothing if not admirable in its cruelty, because the things he’d rather forget were still there.

When he opened his eyes, there was no one, nothing but the snow to keep him company. He stood up and kept walking.

*

_It’s one of those rare days when he was in his office at Stark Tower instead of in the armor aboard the helicarrier. He was sitting at his desk, surrounded by paperwork, while Carol gave her report on their last Avengers mission. He’s only half-listening, but that was mostly enough. The other half of his attention was busy scrolling down the feeds in his head—international approval ratings for SHIELD, a simulcast of the Latverian ambassador’s speech at the UN headquarters in Vienna, the opening of the London Stock Exchange._

_Tony was also methodically going through the paper files of every active agent on SHIELD’s roster, marking anything that looked remotely suspicious. He resented having to work in this fashion, but hard-copies were less easily modified than their digital counterparts, less likely to have already been compromised._

_Leafing through the papers, he absently pulled out a pair of old reading glasses from the top drawer of his desk and put them on, while Carol’s voice floated in and out from the background. They were thick, black frames, and the weight of them on the bridge of his nose is a familiar one._

_—SI stock had risen 12 percent by the closing bell of the NYSE, marking a record high for the company’s fiscal quarter—_

_“Sentry’s in midtown helping with cleanup crews—”_

_—De Los Reyes, Elena; level 5 clearance, West Point grad, high marks in espionage and infiltration ops—_

_There's a second of confusion where his vision was blurred, but it was only for a second. His vision cleared almost instantaneously as the Extremis adjusted his eyes accordingly to the grade of the glasses. He blinked, once, twice, before he took off the glasses, rubbing tiredly at his eyes._

_“Tony, what’s wrong?”_

_“Sorry, force of habit. You were saying?”_

_“Well, that depends,” Carol said, a tick of annoyance infused with worry in her voice. “Did you hear the last part of what I just said? Or anything?”_

_“Yes, Carol,” said Tony, and looked up at her standing in front of his desk, arms crossed over her chest. He was certain the smile he gave her was strained. “SHIELD’s taking care of the cleanup for the whole Venom Bomb catastrophe. I have Deputy Director Hill liaising with the UN with possible sanctions against Latveria, because we can’t actually arrest Doom.”_

_“Yeah, yeah, you got everything taken care of,” she said, rolling her eyes and sounding more than a little bitter._

_“What do you mean?”_

_“I’m supposed to be leading this Avengers team, but you’re busy being a control freak doing everything. You’re running yourself ragged.”_

_"I'm not a control freak."_

_Carol leveled him with a withering look, and didn't say anything. Tony frowned._

_"Carol, you’re not really here to talk to me about my micromanaging tendencies, are you?”_

_She narrowed her eyes, but didn't look surprised. “I wanted to talk about Jessica.”_

_“What about Agent Drew?” he asked, his voice carefully neutral._

_"You put her back on the team."_

_"Do you object to that?"_

_Carol scoffed. “If I’m going to lead the Avengers, like really lead them, I would think I’d be consulted before you make these types of decisions. Why did Jessica defect back to us?”_

_“Have you tried asking Jessica herself?”_

_Carol turned away, hand going up to the back of her neck. “She won’t tell me,” Carol said. “She’s barely spoken to me since she came back.”_

_Jessica had come back, he wanted to say, to tell us we have traitors in our ranks and we don't know who. He couldn't trust anyone nowadays, not with the threat of the Skrulls looming over his head like a knife, but it was so hard to believe that this Carol could be an impostor. There was a forlornness to her expression that should be impossible to replicate, but it was his job to contemplate worst-case scenarios, the possibility that the Skrulls already knew them well enough to mimic human heartbreak._

_Tony looked down at his hand on the desk. “I’m sorry, Carol. All I can tell you is that we need her on the team.”_

_There’s a pause after his answer, and when she finally replied, she had already turned away, ready to spring into flight._

_“We don’t feel like a team,” she said quietly, before flying out through the open balcony of the tower, the red sash around her waist trailing behind her._

_It was a pity she had left already before he could agree. Their team was held together only by desperation and duty, by the fact that most of them didn't know how to be anything other than an Avenger. But any camaraderie they had was strained, buckling under the guilt of fighting old friends, and mourning others._

_He sighed, and continued reading through the SHIELD agent roster._

*

He had lost count of the number of hours he had been out in the snow, only measuring the passage of time in the number of footsteps he’d taken. One step, two, a hundred, a thousand. The air was so cold it stung his throat, and the sound of snow crunching underfoot was unnaturally loud to his ears. It made him feel vulnerable, how loud his footsteps were, how raspy his breathing was, as though it was just inviting some predator to find him in the wide open plains of Siberia.

Tony was almost at his breaking point when something appeared in the distance, a smudge of color in the horizon breaking the great monotony of white. He laughed, relief seeping through him like warmth, as the station finally came into view, a bunker half-buried in snow.

He quickened his pace, the promise of respite urging him on. Something eased in his chest, but it didn't last long.

He didn't make it more than five steps before a flurry of bullets crossed his path. Several bullets ricocheted off the armor, the sharp bursts of fire ringing painfully in his ears. He lumbered backwards, out of the way of gunfire, loud noises that rang throughout the valley. Looking wildly around for the ambusher, the weak dusk light caught on a glint of gold, before a hard, black boot kicked him in the jaw. The attacker jumped back and ran at him with a pistol in each hand, and he ducked down, before knocking one pistol from the attacker's hand and shooting away the other with a repulsor shot. The maneuver left his centre open, and a knee caught him on the jaw, forcing him back before he could re-aim.

He stood up, but the figure had rolled and retreated away from him, aiming at him with the sniper rifle she’d unslung from her shoulder.

Remembrance took a second to catch up to the present, overworked servers searching through a jumble of images to match up the woman in front of him to a name. For a second, he thought she must’ve been one of the memories he’d systematically erased, existing in his mind only as a fragment of recognition.

Relief wasn't quite the word he felt when he realised the long dark hair and bright gold mask was still familiar to him.

Madame Masque stood in front of him, solid and real and most definitely not a hallucination. Tony just wasn’t that lucky.

“At this range,” Whitney finally spoke, her voice calm, the first real voice Tony had heard in ages, “I can shoot you through the eyeholes of your faceplate.” The gun was braced against her shoulder as she looked through the scope. He held the repulsors up, the flat of his palms pointing directly at her head—a standoff.

“What are you doing here, Whitney?”

“What does it look like, Stark?

“Is it Osborn? What do you think you’ll get out of this deal by bringing me in? You have to know Osborn’s probably lying through his teeth with whatever he promised you—”

"Don't try talking your way out of this, Stark," she cut him off, still pointing the gun directly at his head. Her voice was a hollow sound against her mask. “I’m not doing this for anyone but myself.”

He paused, before he lowered one hand to pull up the faceplate, keeping one repulsor trained on her. The cold air stung on his bare face, bringing a flush to his cheeks. “Why are you doing this then?”

“I should be the one who gets to kill you.”

“But you haven’t pulled the trigger yet.”

She turned her head up from the scope to look at him, but the gun’s aim didn’t waver. “Oh, Tony. They told me you were crazy.”

“You know, they say the same thing about you.”

“Well? Are you, Tony?” she demanded. “What are you doing out here in the goddamn Russian backwaters with that piece of scrap metal? ”

“I don’t have to tell you.”

“Listen to the crazy lady with the gun, darling.”

“Which you still haven’t shot me with,” he repeated. “You want something from me.”

“I want you to tell me the truth,” she said, after a pause. She looked at him straight in the face, with her eyes boring into his. “I used to tell myself that you never loved me, that you were just using me.”

“I loved you. We were killing each other, but I loved you,” Tony said. Even with his damaged memory, he didn’t think he was lying. He licked his lips, chapped from the cold.

“Then prove it,” she spat out harshly, before her voice turned soft, almost sweet. “Come with me. Won’t that be romantic? Two doomed lovers, on the run from the world, doomed and in love. Two lovers on the run from a world determined to crush them—won’t that be insane?”

He shook his head side to side. “I can’t do that, Whitney.”

"Tony, Tony, Tony...you have to understand," she replied, her voice still and quiet and all the more dangerous for it. "If I can't have you—is it that Potts woman? Tell me what I want to hear, or I'm gonna hand you over to Osborn, and then I'm going to find Potts and kill her."

He bit his lip, and tried to keep his aim steady. "She doesn't have anything to do with the two of us."

"Apparently she has everything to do with this."

"What did you come out here for, Whitney?" he asked again, his voice firm.

She spoke through gritted teeth, her voice shaking with anger. "You used to love me, Tony."

"The woman I loved wouldn't have worked for Norman Osborn."

Even from beneath the mask, Tony saw her eyes widen in surprise. Pressing his advantage, he continued, his voice raspy and desperate. "If our time together meant anything to you," Tony said, "you have to let me go."

Whitney still didn't respond, just kept her rifle trained on Tony, her aim unwavering. "I've never been a particularly kind person," she said finally. "You didn't love me for my mercy or my selflessness."

“But I did love you. Once.”

"You don't have to do whatever it is you're doing. You don't owe anything to anyone. We'll run away together and not care about anything, like we should have done long ago. We can disappear."

"You know I can't," he said grimly.

Whitney shot at him, and the bullet just barely missed as he stepped to the side, grazing his temple. Blood ran down his face and over one eye, warm and sticky and staining his vision red. He shot back wildly, lowering the faceplate back down, before coming at her at a run. Underneath his palms he could feel the warmth of the repulsors recharging. Heavy as the armor was, it was his only defense against her—he was hardly in any condition to take her in hand-to-hand. He ran at her, bracing his shoulder forward like a quarterback to knock her off her feet, but she’d brought up the rifle in front of her to intercept his tackle, the gun breaking in two.

She ducked away, before reappearing to his immediate left, moving lightning-quick to smashing the butt of the gun on the back of his neck, where this old armor was weak and vulnerable. He fell to his knees and swung out blindly, the brunt of his fist striking her ribs. She fell to the ground, coughing and clutching her side, the blow of his armored fist having knocked the wind out of her.

Tony exhaled, his breath rough and shallow. It was hard to fight, hard when you had forgotten most of the things you'd learned (most of the things _he_ taught you), but the motion of pulling his palms up to aim his repulsors was hardwired into him, entrenched into basic muscle memory. The repulsors gave a sharp whine as he aimed at Whitney, calculating how best to incapacitate her just enough to let him escape.

Before he could fire, he was suddenly wracked by agonising pain, and he felt the crackle of electrical discharge run up the length of his spine. He looked down his front to see the protrusion of a claw out of his chest, a holographic light of a hand, half-shimmering as though it were just a projection. Phased through himself and the armor. He fell back to the ground on all fours and pulled up the faceplate to hack up blood on the snow, before his arms collapsed and he fell to the ground.

"Osborn needs him alive, Ghost," said Whitney. The man in the white helmet shrugged as he replied.

"Didn't hit anything vital. Just poked a couple of nerves, needed to short-circuit him. Easy with the armor he's got on—the thing's ancient," Ghost replied, offering a hand to help her up, which she batted away.

"I told you to wait while I dealt with this," Whitney said as she got to her feet.

"Didn't look like you was dealing with it all that good," he said. His emaciated, half-corporeal figure—a too-large head, long limbs, menacingly sharp claws for hands—was surrounded by a light, blueish glow, matching the glow of his empty eyes, which looked like headlights affixed to his face. The wind whipped his tattered white clothing about him, giving the impression that he was a wisp of smoke about to be blown away.

"It's none of your business," snapped Whitney.

"Do I just pretend I didn't hear most of that conversation before I got here, then?"

"Just pick up Stark and we'll get somewhere where we can signal Osborn," Whitney snapped, brushing snow off her shoulder and tossing the broken remnants of her sniper rifle to the side. Tony could feel himself twitching from where he was immobile on the ground, numb and insensate. He frantically tried to think of ways to escape, at least maybe self-destruct the armor to take himself out along with Whitney and Ghost so they couldn't bring him to Osborn, but he had no way to activate the sequence, his fingers were unresponsive—

But as Whitney and Ghost prepared to take him, a spray of bullets came down between him and them, sending up a cloud of snow. Whitney rolled backwards and removed the pistols from her thigh holsters, pointing them in in the direction of where the shots came from, but already the unknown assailant was behind her. They elbowed Whitney in her already bruised ribs at the same time as they directed a high kick at Ghost, who failed to dematerialise in time to avoid the blow to his jaw.

In movements that were almost too quick for his tired eyes to follow, his unknown rescuer stepped on Whitney’s hands and kicked away her pistols, before striking the butt of the rifle onto her temple. In the commotion, their fur-lined hood had fallen back, revealing thick reflective goggles and long blonde hair tied back in a ponytail. Ghost got to his feet and lunged at her, claws raised, but she sidestepped the movement easily, and hit the back of his head with her rifle. He fell forward on top of Whitney with a yelp, but not before the figure had grabbed the device affixed to Ghost's belt.

Instead of raising a gun, his rescuer raised the device in front of her, pointing it at Ghost and Whitney like a weapon. A dial tone rang out, followed shortly by the click of a call being received, before it was cut off by Ghost’s gargled scream, as both he and Whitney were suddenly absorbed by bright blue light. He closed his eyes against the blinding flash, and when he opened them, both Ghost and Whitney were gone.

Tony blinked his eyes and wondered for the umpteenth time if this was just his brain acting up some more. But this wasn't a hallucination. The person who rescued him was a faint outline, a figure in white that nearly disappeared against the endless expanse of snow.

Sharon Carter turned around to face him, and slung her rifle over her shoulder.

“You’re a hard man to find, Tony Stark.”


	4. the eternal angel of death

“Sh—sharon?” said Tony, gaping as Sharon just slung her rifle on her back, and pulled up the large, reflective goggles to reveal her face, pale pink from the cold.

She stepped forward and grabbed him by the arms, pulled him to his feet, and put his arm over her shoulder. “Up we go,” she said, “we need to get you out of the cold.“

Tony was still mostly dumb-struck as he let himself be half-carried, Sharon taking charge as she pulled him into the bunker. The thick steel doors opened with a loud groan after Sharon input the access code he gave her onto the keypad. He hadn’t used this facility in ages.

“I’ve gotta say, Stark,” Sharon started to say once they were inside, “you don’t pull off the messy stubble look very well.”

“I didn’t have time to keep up my clean-shaven disguise on the run. Just be grateful I didn’t have time to dye my hair blond.”

Cheap fluorescent lighting turned on as they entered the main room, revealing a lab with grey concrete walls and bare bones equipment. Sharon carefully deposited him on the old, moth-eaten sofa, before shucking off her thick parka and collapsing in the seat next to him. A thin cloud of dust flew up as when she sat down, and she waved a hand in front of her face to dissipate it.

It was still cold enough inside the bunker that their puffs of breath were visible, but Tony could already feel some warmth seeping back into his face and extremities. He began to take off the armor, piece by piece, gingerly unfastening the gauntlets first, then the chestplate, then the helmet. The metal was burning cold to his bare hands.

Tony finished taking off the rest of the armor, leaving them on an unceremonious pile on the floor. They sat together with just the low buzzing hum of the generators coming to life in the background.

There was honestly no graceful way to break the silence that had settled so, “...Thanks out there. For saving my life.”

Sharon brushed her hair from her face. “Don’t thank me just yet, Stark. I didn’t exactly save you out of purely altruistic reasons.”

“How did you beat Ghost?”

“Lucky intel. Fury’s. That man has backup plans for his backup plans,” she explained. “He’s gathered some of the old guard, loyal SHIELD agents, and of course he has men in HAMMER. We got wind of their R&D developing something like this,” she said, taking the phone out of her pocket, a nondescript white cell phone. “It’s a special phone that translated Ghost’s phasing abilities into telecommunication signals. I dialed the number of an abandoned SHIELD desert outpost in southeastern Australia. They should be out of our hair, for now.”

He stayed quiet, waiting for her to start talking about what she really came here for.

Sharon looked him right in the eye, intense and focused, heavy with the gravity of what she was about to say next. “I think I found a way to bring Steve Rogers back.”

Tony felt his mouth go dry. He closed his eyes deliberately. Maybe he’d been too quick to dismiss all of this as a hallucination. Maybe the visions of his deteriorating brain were more advanced than he thought. Maybe he _was_ going mad.

He opened his eyes when Sharon reached forward and grabbed his hand in hers. She was still there, solid and real, with a worried look on her face. “Stark?”

“I’m alright, Sharon,” he said quickly. “I—how did you find me?”

“Pepper Potts,” she answered, letting go of his hand. “She’s on the run from Osborn now. She was trying to find Maria Hill, who was with Black Widow. That’s how I found them. Once I told them the situation, we translocated your armor’s signature to here, but I lost track of you somewhere outside Irkutsk.”

“My armor...malfunctioned. You said you could bring Steve back,” he asked next, and he was glad to note that he was able to say his name without faltering. “How? And what do you need me for?”

“I remembered everything, Stark. Even the things everyone decided to keep from me, including you,” she said, her voice calm, even as Tony tried not to look too guilty. “I remember the Red Skull and Zola brainwashing me to kill him. But the gun I used, the bullet I shot him with—it didn’t just kill him.”

Tony felt his heart skip a beat. “What?”

“They had me drugged up to my gills while I was in their custody, but they talked—they were talking about spatial-temporal displacement. A time platform of some sort. I don’t have the five doctorates I need to understand everything I heard, but I was figuring you might.”

“Well, I only have just the four.”

Sharon smiled. “We can work with that.”

His head was hurting. He’d been out in the cold too long, possibly. “I still don’t understand. Why do you think that means Steve isn’t dead?”

“While you’ve been away, Osborn declared me an enemy of the state—”

“You’re in good company.”

“—because he needs me brought in. I remember Zola talking about—something about how I was an anchor to the present. They need me to bring Steve back…which means Steve can be brought back,” she finished, the words hanging over his head like with all the weight of a guillotine.

Tony furrowed his brow. “But why would they, of all people, want to bring Steve back?”

“Killing Steve was all part of a plan. They want to use his body for something, I don’t know what, but it can’t be anything good. But as long as I’m alive, they’re not getting their hands on Steve Rogers,” Sharon said, her eyes blazing with anger and determination. “So whatever you’re doing, you have to stop it. This is now the most important thing on your to-do list, Tony.”

Sharon was right. He could...this could be the last thing he did, before he deleted his brain entirely. What with Sharon and him together, they would have the entirety of HAMMER on their heels, but they were always going to have to avoid capture even if they had never teamed up. The point was to make sure the enemy didn’t know that they were together, so they wouldn’t think to consolidate their resources into one manhunt.

Tony put his hand on the back of his neck, tracing the terminal ports there with his fingertips. His motives warranted careful examination. If he and Sharon got caught, the fallout would be disastrous. After he spent all that time convincing Maria and Pepper how very, _very_ bad it would be for his brain to fall into Osborn’s hands, if they caught Sharon too, then all the things he warned them about would come true and worse, because then there’d be no one to try to bringing Steve back.

Would it be selfish, to want to be the one to do this?

( _Of course it is. You’re Tony Stark._ )

But if they could bring Steve back, that should be some way towards making up for the mess he made. He could help bring Steve back, before picking up where he left off on the whole brain-delete business. A world with Captain America in it, but no Tony Stark might be better; maybe that’s why everything had gone to shit lately, he thought. It’s an alternative worth exploring, worth risking the odds for.

World’s most wanted one and two. This was a terrible idea, but it wasn’t as if what he got going on prior to this was all that better.

“What do you need me to do?”

Sharon nodded her head expectantly, as though she had never thought he’d refuse. Perhaps she knew him better than he thought.

“We can stay here for the night and catch some rest, but we’ll need to head out soon. Madame Masque and Ghost know our exact location and if they manage to get in contact with Osborn, we’ll have a HAMMER helicarrier on our tails. I’d rather not have that.”

Tony stood up and walked to the closet, grabbing a thermal jacket. “I need a day to prepare. That’s pushing it, but I think we have at least that much time. I have equipment here I can use to fix the armor to full functionality. I can also run some tests on you.”

“On me?” asked Sharon.

“To see why they need you to bring Steve back. I have a hunch. I could rebuild their tech, but I don’t have the proper resources here. HAMMER’s shut down all major SI facilities that weren’t hidden and I’ve blitzed most of the rest. The only other facility I know with the necessary sophistication to build something like it is the Baxter Building.”

“Wouldn’t that be risky?”

Tony nodded. “Yes. But Reed’s registered, and he’s trustworthy. As long as we don’t tip off Osborn, we could build the device right under HAMMER’s nose, and with Reed’s help the construction would go even faster.”

“I’ll have Potts and Hill meet us there then,” she said, as she stood up to help him bring the pieces of the armor to the work bench. They arranged the armor on the counter like a patient on a medical exam table. The RT generator he would’ve plugged into to continue the autolobotomisation process was in the far corner of the room.

“Shouldn’t you rest first?”

“I can rest once I’ve finished this. I’ll need it more then.”

“What can I do to help?” Sharon asked.

“I need—” he stopped, as a sharp pain erupted in his temple. He put a hand up to his eyes, rubbing tiredly. The adrenaline and renewed sense of purpose had given him a certain clarity of thought that he hadn’t experienced since he started the deletion sequence, but he suspected it wasn’t sustainable for the long run. If he was going to do this,  he needed to be at his most lucid and competent. Even if he stopped right now, he was already halfway through deleting his brain, so he needed to make something that could to help with his brain function and halt the cognitive decay, function as a crutch for what he’d already lost.

“I need to assemble an RT rig. It would power the armor and...and me. It would interface with my existing biotech enhancements, to optimise my brain function and pause the autolobotomisation process, so I wouldn’t have to downgrade armor models.”

Sharon looked skeptically around the lab. “And you can make that here?”

“The RT generator over there. It produces the unique energy signature and power output of repulsor tech. I can miniaturize it and plug it into my system. A medical implant of sorts.”

“Why do I get the feeling that plugging it into your system is as literal as it sounds?”

Tony gave her an apologetic smile. “It won’t be the worst thing I’ve stuck in my chest. I’ll just need your help with that.”

“Stark, I’m an agent, not a surgeon.”

“Think of it like defusing a bomb then, agent.”

Sharon still looked skeptical, but she nodded. “Sometimes I forget you made Iron Man in a cave.”

“I had a little help with that too,” he said solemnly.

The autolobotomisation process made it slow work at first. The sequence had gone so far as to affect his motor functions, but he worked through it. It was slightly terrifying, that at times he’d forget how to use the screwdriver in his hand, and there were moments of blankness where he’d be staring at a circuit panel with no inkling of what to do next. But the longer he worked, the more his hands still remembered, even if he wasn’t able to explain the scientific principles that told him to solder the red and blue wires together. He wanted to say it was determination, that he now had a greater sense of purpose than self-annihilation, but more than anything it was probably desperation and residual adrenaline that spurred him on.

They didn’t talk much, only one conversation at the start before they got to work. Tony had asked Sharon for a sample of her blood to run through the lab scanners, to try and find out why Osborn was as hellbent on capturing Sharon as he was to capture Tony. The scan would run for a couple of hours while he set down to repair the Mark V, repairing the flight and propulsion systems as well as the damages incurred from fighting Whitney and Ghost.

As she inserted a syringe into her arm, Tony spoke. “It’ll be tricky sneaking back to New York with a warrant on both our heads.”

“We can manage. We’ll go back in the same way I got out.”

“And how’s that?”

“Flying car.”

“Can’t go wrong with the classics, I guess,” Tony said. “But what’s Osborn got on you anyway? Presuming he still needs a semblance of probable cause to detain people.”

“He publicly announced my warrant in a worldwide broadcast three days ago as the primary suspect in the murder of Steve Rogers,” she said tonelessly.

Just when he thought he’d thought Osborn couldn’t get any lower. “Fucking scumbag,” he said under his breath.

Sharon laughed, cold and self-deprecating, as she pulled the needle out of her arm. Blood trickled down her forearm, a dark red line on her snow-pale skin. She pressed a bandage on the crook of her elbow. “They’re not entirely wrong. I did kill Steve.”

“You didn’t kill Steve Rogers.” _You couldn’t have,_ Tony thought, _because I did._

She turned away, although Tony was certain she had intended to refute him. “I’ll go contact Potts,” she answered finally, leaving him alone with his tools.

*

The arc reactor, when he finished hours later, was a thin disk of machinery and light about the width of his palm. It wasn’t as sophisticated as the one he made for Pepper, but it would serve his purposes, let him last until they’ve gotten back to New York, until he’s constructed the device to bring Steve back.

“There are chronal tracers in your blood,” Tony said to Sharon, tilting his head up to look at her from where he was lying down on the table.

“What? Wait, explain later. Don’t distract me,” she replied.

“Chronal tracers,” he replied, breathing hard. “That’s what they meant when they said you’re Steve’s anchor to the present. There are tachyon markers in your blood for—”

“Hold _still_ , explain later,” she repeated, clamping down on his shoulder, forcing him flat down on the table. “SHIELD prepared me for a lot of things, but impromptu open heart surgery isn’t one of them, okay?”

“It’s not heart surgery. You’re just affixing the RT to my chest so that it can interface with the biocybernetic frame left behind by Extremis—”

Sharon rolled her eyes, and continued cutting a shallow incision into his chest. “I’m putting a metal disk under your skin and screwing it to your sternum with sterilised garage equipment and a first aid kit while hoping I don’t puncture your lungs.”

Tony laughed weakly. They didn’t have any anesthetic. “It’s barely in my chest cavity,” he quipped.

Sharon didn’t answer him, ignoring him in favor of reading the instructions on the screen hanging above the work table. Tony had typed out the instructions beforehand, though he would’ve just talked her through the whole procedure, but they couldn’t take the chance that he might pass out halfway through the installation with his chest cut open to the hypodermis. None of Sharon’s movements gave away her uncertainty, precise and meticulous.

He didn’t pass out during the procedure, but his vision came and went and dimmed at certain points, dark spots obscuring his view of the water stains on the concrete ceiling. He dug his nails into the meat of his thighs hard enough to draw blood as Sharon’s deft hands installed the RT, affixing the metal plates, then moving the surgical needle to close the wound around the arc reactor. He thought of the old surgery scars on his chest from what seemed like a lifetime ago, erased when he first got Extremis, now returned as a brand new set.

The arc reactor came online with a surge of energy through his fingertips, like a breath of air that filled his lungs to bursting. He gasped, and a sudden upsurge of code ran in front of his eyes. As suddenly as it came, the barrage of sensation stopped.

When he came to, Sharon had come up to the table and had him sitting upright against her with his back to her front as she put the dressings on the implant, wrapping bandages around his chest.

“You passed out there, at the end. But your vitals are okay,” she said. “They’re better, actually, once this thing turned on.”

Tony looked down at his chest, where the light shone through the layers of bandage. For the first time in days, he could think clearly, as though a dense fog had lifted from his mind. “It’s a physical augmentation device designed to do exactly that. They should be better.”

“I thought you lost Extremis.”

“I did. But I still had all the physiological changes it left me. When I lost Extremis, I—” Tony paused, frowning for a second, “I was basically a really advanced computer without an operating system.”

Sharon cut off the strip of bandage and knotted it tightly. “The arc reactor’s replaced Extremis?”

“No, it’s not that advanced. This is just a battery. It’s using the interface Extremis created inside me to disperse bioelectric pulses to accelerate healing, boost my autonomic nervous system, the works—all in all just telling my body to function better.”

“Some people just get pacemakers.”

“I’ve had pacemakers. At least this one I won’t have to charge.”

The flesh around the implant was still tender, but he’d wager that it was already starting to heal, tissues knitting together, hemostatic agents curbing the bleeding. Hs recuperative processes was one of the functions the arc reactor was designed to improve.

“Thanks,” he said, somewhat lamely.

“Anytime, director,” Sharon said drily, his old title a friendly taunt. As he rubbed a hand over the flat disk in his chest, Tony looked over his shoulder to look at her, and saw that she was smiling slightly, a small, tired smile of relief. It was the first real smile he’d seen on her since she rescued him.

*

They head out a full half day later, Sharon forcing Tony to rest longer than he wanted. If he were honest, he didn’t protest as much as he could have, as the toll of working sixteen hours straight after being beaten around by Madame Masque, thereafter followed by surgery, was something even he couldn’t shake off with his superhuman capacity for denial. The respite of sleep and shelter from the cold went some ways to alleviating the bone-deep aches in his body. He was still tired from the procedure, his body still bruised from his fight with Whitney and Ghost, but the arc reactor was doing its job, and Sharon had helped him patch up the worst of his injuries.

The energy of the makeshift RT thrummed through his body; his limbs felt less heavy, his cognitive functions improved so that he no longer felt so sluggish. The arc reactor was a dense weight in his chest that made him feel almost whole again.

The sun reflected brightly on the snow when they stepped out of the bunker, Tony wearing the Mark V, Sharon in her thick parka. She lead them several miles away to where she had hidden the flying car.

The SHIELD logo over the side of the doors was painted over with not quite the same shade of black as the rest of the car. “You were supposed to return these when you resigned,” he said with a laugh.

She smirked. “I borrowed this one from Fury,” she said, as she got in the driver’s side.

Including refueling stops, and avoiding commercial flight routes and the more heavily HAMMER- monitored airspace, the trip to New York by flying car was going to take roughly two days. They had agreed on five-hour shifts, swapping in and out, with Sharon taking the first shift. Tony stowed the armor in the trunk of the car, and settled into the passenger’s seat.

Sharon revved the engine, the car wobbling slightly as the wheels retracted, before jetting off. Seen from afar, the car was  a dark streak that left in its trail a flurry of agitated snow and dust.

They flew low, a couple of thousand meters off the ground, high enough to take cover among the lower altitude clouds but low enough that he could still make out the outline of the terrain below. Sitting in his seat, Tony rested his forehead on the cool, reinforced glass of his window, and let himself drift back to sleep.

When Sharon nudged him awake, they were back on the ground, winding down the road in what she explained was Arkhangelsk. This first refueling stop was a SHIELD outpost, she explained, one she had used in various undercover ops in the region, and unlikely to have been touched at all, being so out of the way. Tony didn’t know if that was something he forgot from his time as director, or if he ever knew that to begin with.

The outpost was a simple bunker in the middle of the woods,  filled with stock supplies for covert operations, including fuel and various ammunition. It also had food rations, which Tony was grateful for; his own lab had been stocked with only the bare minimum in food supplies, and it was just through considerable practice that he was able to forget how hungry he was the entire time. They grabbed some of the MREs while they refueled, and ate them as they sat on the ground, resting back against the side of the car.

Perhaps it was the fact that they hadn’t said anything to each other that wasn’t perfunctory since he woke up, that Sharon asked as they were eating, “So why were you deleting your brain anyway?”

“Pepper and Maria didn’t tell you?” Tony asked, surprised.

“They told me you were in trouble and needed help, but no. Neither of them gave me any details.”

Tony considered his answer carefully, before scraping the bottom of his can of peaches and scooping out the last of it. “There’s only one copy of the SHRA database in existence.”

At the mention of the SHRA, he felt her tense beside him. “Oh.”

“Yep. Didn’t you guys wonder why Osborn isn’t raining hell on Spider-man by now?”

“The thought had crossed my mind,” Sharon said, “but I just assumed the whole affair just fell by the wayside, after Skrulls proved to be a more dire threat than untrained superheroes.”

“It had, but Osborn’s priorities aren’t normal. He had all these plans for it—it was like he had a checklist of the scenarios I had compiled, of what could happen should the database fall into the wrong hands, and he was going to tick them off one by one. It’s why I had to go on the run in the first place.”

“He told everyone you were a Skrull collaborator.”

“On live TV. I was watching.”

“Better or worse than being the woman who killed Captain America?”

“I think we can safely say it’s a tie.”

“So you’re telling me you’re deleting your brain to prevent access to the database,” said Sharon. “And was Kirensk just an aesthetic choice, or…?”

“I needed access to the RT terminal there. It’s the key to initiate the deletion sequence.”

“Seems pretty drastic, present circumstances notwithstanding,” she said bluntly.

“I’m in the middle of deleting my brain, so that Osborn won’t get his hands on the only existing copy of the SHRA database,” he replied. “Because if he gets his hands on that, then Steve will have been completely right, and you know how he gets when he’s right.”

Her mouth quirked upwards. “You mean the face he makes when he’s trying not to say ‘I told you so’?”

“Yep.”

They shared a laugh, even though it wasn’t really all that funny. Perhaps it was just how neither of them had expected this at all, the company of someone who understood, empathy and commiseration from unexpected places. Tony was glad he still remembered that detail about Steve, if only because he was able to share it with Sharon.

Tony drove the next leg of the journey, until they stopped and refuelled in Kosovo, and switched. They continued like that, flying over the continent, stopping to refuel two more times, over Avignon, over Figueira and the coast of the Atlantic. Along the way, they hashed out the details of their plan, discussing possible scenarios for when they reached stateside. The rest of the trip they mostly let pass in silence, Tony either resting or drafting blueprints on how to rebuild the time platform when he wasn’t driving.

It was nighttime on the last leg of their journey as they flew over the middle of the Atlantic when Tony thought to speak out of the blue, apropos of nothing. Sharon was staring quietly out her window when he suddenly said, “I don’t know what to say to him when I see him.”

He felt Sharon stare at him, but he looked straight ahead at the horizon, holding the wheel tightly as though they might hit traffic in the middle of the ocean.

“By then, you’d have brought him back. Won’t that be enough of an apology?” she said, in a quiet voice.

“I remember the last words I said to him. I’ve forgotten so many things, but I still remember that.”

“You can’t take back what you said, even if you no longer remember them.”

“Some things I would be glad to forget.”

Sharon paused, before turning away to gaze back out the window again as she replied. “I know how that feels. You know I know. You knew I was pregnant with his kid,” she said. “Sometimes I think about the life we could’ve lived, if we didn’t live this one.”

Tony’s grip on the steering wheel tightened, his knuckles turning pale white. “We’re getting him back. If there was ever anyone who deserved a happy ending, it’s Steve,” he replied, “and you’re the best chance he has of that.”

Sharon shook her head, smiling, and it was all wrong, full of pity as though they weren’t talking about her immeasurable loss. “You don’t understand, Stark. I lost my child. They made me kill the man I loved. I’m going to get Steve back,” Sharon replied, “but that’s all my heart can manage.”

“But you’re still going to get him back?”

She was still smiling, small and hopeless. “The mission is all that counts,” she told him, and it sounded like something she’s told herself before once, a hundred times.

“Damage—damaged does not mean broken,” said Tony hesitantly. “Won’t you at least try to fix things?” His breath caught on the last word, as though he didn’t mean to ask the question, suddenly apprehensive of everything that hinged upon her answer.

“Looking at him hurts,” she finished simply, before turning on her side away from him to sleep, signalling the conversation at an end.

Tony drove the car over the water, and stole sideways glances at Sharon as she slept. She was turned away from him, arms crossed against her chest, her head bowed down. He wondered, as her eyelids flickered in REM sleep, if her dreams were anything like his. They might be. They might be worse. Tony didn’t know if the sense of distance should make it better, that maybe the fact that he didn’t have the memory of Steve dying in front of him meant that there were less images to haunt him, or if it meant that his imagination just had more free reign to torment him however it wanted.

Or maybe he did see Steve die in front of him, and that was just one more thing he couldn’t remember anymore?

Probably not. But there were more ways to kill a man than to have been the one to pull the trigger.

Both desperate and on the run, both in love with Steve Rogers, both guilty of having killed him. What a pair they made.

*

The receiver on the dashboard crackled to life the moment a very familiar skyline became discernible at the farthest edge of the horizon. They were flying into New York airspace, the top down, leaving the cold sea air behind them, just as Maria’s stern voice came on the radio to ask, “Identify yourselves, or we will shoot you down before you even touch the ground.”

Tony smiled. “Good to hear from you again, Hill,” he said.

The other end of the line went quiet, followed by the dull thumping feedback of a microphone being shuffled over. “Tony?!” another female voice finally said.

“Pepper,” he answered.

“You absolute idiot! Are you alright?”

“I’m fine. Sharon managed to find me just in time, so thanks for sending her after me.”

There’s a crackle of laughter on the radio as Pepper replied in a slightly shaky voice. “Anytime, boss.”

“Not to cut your tearful reunions short, but can you tell us where to land this thing?” Sharon said. “This is one of Fury’s cars, so we’re invisible to most sensors, but I don’t fancy being in the same airspace as Osborn’s helicarrier for too long.”

There’s a noise on the other end that gave Tony the impression that the microphone was being shuffled back, and sure enough, Maria’s voice was back on comm, a hint of triumphant laughter in her voice. “Managed to not freeze to death, did you?”

“Couldn’t get rid of me that easy.”

“Wouldn’t want to. Do you know how much trouble I got into just to get your damn hard drive?” Maria replied, and Tony could almost see her rolling her eyes. “Agent Carter, please fly the car in to the south face of the Baxter Building. Richards has the hangar open on the thirty-second floor.”

Sharon manoeuvred the car as per Maria’s instructions, the wind brushing her hair into a bouffant cloud as they began to descend. The ride into the the building on 42nd and Madison was uneventful, even as she asked, “Isn’t the Baxter Building under constant observation?”

“I heard Osborn tried to seize the building a week ago,” Tony answered. “He didn’t succeed, I imagine. I’ll ask Reed when we light down.”

The south face of the thirty-second floor looked the same as any of the regular glass panes of the rest of the building, but the car flew smoothly through, with just the faint sensation of a scanner on his skin as they passed through the hologram. An automated voice rang out just as Sharon parked the car to a stop, saying, “Identity scan complete: Sharon Carter and Anthony Stark confirmed.”

Maria walked in as they were both coming out of the doors, hands on her hips and a smirk on her face. A flurry of red hair followed after her, as Pepper came in after her and ran up to him, flinging her arms around his neck and hugging him tight.

“Tony! We were so worried about you!” Pepper said. Tony tucked his face in the crook of her neck and tried not to be too obviously relieved. He still recognized her face, still remembered the faint smell of her perfume.

“She was,” Maria corrected as Pepper stepped back to stand next to her. “I was mostly worried that you put me through all that trouble to get yourself killed.”

“So you managed to retrieve the hard drive just fine?” Tony asked.

“Fine is a word for it. But I did as you said. Then I found Romanov, who put me through to Barnes.”

He felt Sharon turn alert on his left. “Are they here?” she asked, a note of urgency in her voice.

“They’re upstairs with the Fantastic Four,” said Pepper. “Along with some Avengers, like you asked us to.”

Sharon nodded. “Good. We need all the help we can get.”

Tony felt himself blanch at the mention of the other Avengers being there, but he should’ve expected as much. Depending on which Avengers they meant, they’d probably be team members he hadn’t seen since the Skrull Invasion, former allies he hadn’t been on friendly terms with since the superhero civil war. After all, they were heroes with just as much reason to run from Osborn.

Now of course, they were all on the same side. There was something hilariously cruel about the fact that it took Osborn being put in charge of world security before they thought Tony was someone they could work with again.

There was the sound of more footsteps at the entrance to the hangar. Tony turned just as Reed’s head wound around the doorway, and the rest of him followed shortly after, along with his wife.

“Tony! We’re so happy you’re okay.” The blonde woman wrapped her arms around him—he knew her name started with an S, and that she was Reed’s wife,  but that was all Tony’s brain could come up with. He settled for smiling wide and hugging her back, with a level of familiarity he hoped was appropriate.

Reed put a hand on his shoulder as his wife stepped back. “We received Agent Carter’s message. I should have all the components we need to reinvent Victor’s device.”

Bare amount of pleasantries…that was the Reed he remembered, at least. “Then we should get to work, right away.”

*

Tony sat cross-legged on the swivelling office chair Reed had procured for him, a pen between his teeth as he drew on the blueprint in front of him. The schematic of the tachyon chamber was superimposed on the glass surface of the table, and his stylus moved across the table lightning quick. A three-dimensional CAD drawing of the whole machine floated beside him as a hologram, changing in real-time to match the alterations he was making.

The next few days after they arrived at the Baxter Building had been consumed by work, fervent, near-frenzied—and if he were honest (which, granted, he made a habit of not being), he was grateful for that fact, that recreating the technology to bring back Steve was taking up so much of his time, because at least it didn’t give him the chance to mull over his decisions.

Being so busy meant he had a valid reason to avoid most of the other Avengers. Natasha and Barnes were in the building, and so were Clint and Hank Pym, none of whom he particularly wanted to see in any case. Sharon came by every day to check on his progress, as well as to provide what help she could by recounting her experience in Zola’s custody. Reed was helping him finish the machine as fast as possible, as were Pym and the Vision, and together they constructed the base skeleton of the machine within three days. Within the week, Tony was tinkering on the theoretically functional prototype of the time platform in the basement of the Baxter Building.

He spread his hand flat over the arc reactor. They weren’t going fast enough.

There were faint black streaks on the glass where his grease-stained hands had rested on the table. The blank tank top and loose jeans Sue had given him were grimy. He should take a shower soon.

He scratched idly at the scruff on his face. He grabbed the coffee mug on the wooden workbench and put it up to his mouth, before realising it was empty.

Tony sat back in his chair with a sigh, and pushed the goggles up from over his face, rubbing tiredly at his eyes. He ran his fingers back through his hair, where it was already some ways back to growing to its regular length. His fingertips grazed the back of his neck, tracing the circular ports that resided there.

The sensation reminded him that he was on borrowed time. He needed to finish this as soon as possible.

An elongated arm came around the corner from the entrance, to nudge his shoulder with the coffee mug in its hands. The rest of Reed Richards arrived a couple of moments later, an armful of blueprints wedged under (or...wounded around by, to be accurate) his other arm.

“Sue told me I should bring you some coffee if I was going to come down here anyway. I have ideas on how to stabilise the chronostatic signal beacon.”

Tony’s eyes widened in surprise, but he accepted the coffee gratefully. “Thanks.”

Reed threw him sideways glances with an expression of open skepticism, but with what passed for discretion for him, considering he was Reed Richards. Reed was one of his best friends, but Tony wasn't friends with him for his excess of tact or social grace.

Tony sighed, put the drafting stylus down and said, "Reed, I can hear you thinking from over here. You can say it."

"Tony...are you sure you made the right choice being here? Risking it all just to bring back Steve?"

“I want to help, Reed.”

“But sometimes that’s the problem,” said Reed flatly. “I created a machine, through which I was able to visualise numerous realities. There were 3,008,296 realities in which something like the Registration Act came to existence and ignited a superhero civil war. Of all those, there are only 418 realities in which the conflict ended peacefully.”

He did some quick arithmetic in his head. “So we just weren’t lucky enough for that 0.013% chance of peaceful resolution?”

“Your non-involvement was one of the common factors in the realities where prolonged conflict was successfully avoided. In fact, barring 5 exceptions, the 418 successful models in which peace was attained by our actions, I acted alone,” Reed explained, in a mere statement of fact.

Tony raised an eyebrow. “How many of these realities were what you could truly call successful, Reed? I can imagine more than a handful of them ended in some form of benevolent rule under your intellect.”

Reed shrugged. “True. In one model I created a machine that gave everyone superhuman capabilities. In another, I stripped everyone of their powers.”

Tony took a sip of his coffee. “Success indeed.”

“In another model, you were a woman, and you were with Steve, and your union is what stopped the war from happening.”

Tony nearly choked on his coffee. Instead, he swallowed, and asked weakly, “Our union?”

Reed nodded. “Marriage. It was the 47th model I examined. As I understood it, you were both a deterrent to each other's aggressive behavior, and were able to cooperate on the implementation of the SHRA that both sides were able to agree on.”

“For some reason, I don’t think that would’ve worked in our case,” Tony said wryly.

“We’re relatively lucky, in comparison to some of these realities.”

“You have a very odd definition of lucky, Reed.”

"I’m just trying to explain,” Reed replied, “that actions have consequences, many of them unintended and unforeseen. Steve died, and it wasn't your fault that he died, no matter what anyone says. You don't have to be the one to do this.”

“Believe me, I’ve thought this through.”

“But what if you just make things worse, just being here?”

There was no accusation in his voice, just neutral concern. Tony knew him better than most people, and Reed wasn't saying this because he was cold or unfeeling. Tony understood the question perfectly. Every second Tony was in New York with his brain full of things Osborn would kill to get his hands on was a risk. He was a walking liability, and he was putting everyone in danger just being here.

Tony agreed, but given the choice, more often than not, he always opted for the more selfish option anyway.

"Your wife ever told you you're not the guy for heart-to-heart conversations?"

"She’s said something similar."

“What happened to your device?”

There was a curious pause before Reed answered. “I destroyed it, because Susan asked me to…Why?”

Pulling up his feet back onto the chair, Tony swivelled back to face the table and picked up a drafting pencil. “It’s nothing. You can’t dwell too much in what could have beens,” he said. Questions danced in his mind, but he realised halfway through formulating them that he didn’t want to know the answer to any of them.

_How many realities were there where Steve didn’t die after our war?_

_How many realities were there in which I died instead of him?_

_How many realities exist in which I didn't kill him?_


	5. into the white

It was just his luck that Sharon couldn’t have found him before he started deleting his brain, because he could be better at this. _Was_ better at this, could build faster and think faster than this, if he hadn’t forgotten half the things that made him useful. He had Reed and the others to help him along, but for the most part he functioned like a one-man assembly line, a sense of urgency and desperation fueling him on despite his considerable handicaps.

He’s working with a damaged computing system, he’s exhausting the servos and the processors are overheating, but that was a problem for the long-run. He’s almost finished, he just needed more time, just a bit more time, and then it could all shut down. It all needed to hold just long enough for him to bring Steve back.

_(He knows he’s running himself ragged, knows as he listens to the diastolic rhythm of his heart—the left atrium fills with blood but the mitral valve labours, too weak, a mid-systolic click followed by a late systolic murmur—transient hypotension as his autonomic nervous system forgets how to work, his heart forgets to beat, forgets for a second, for a moment, forgets like he forgets, his chest hurts and he’s short of breath—_

_And then Steve’s voice calls out from behind him, saying, “Tony, you have to take a break, you’re not a machine.”)_

Tony startled awake over the blueprints on his desk, where he’d fallen to a troubled sleep, and threw the wrench behind him. It smashed against the wall with a loud crack, hair-thin fissures appearing on the glass, emanating outwards from the point of impact like a cobweb.

His chest hurt, he was breathing hard.

He needed to get back to work.

*

“That’s the last chronal bracers installed,” said Reed, wiping the back of his hand against his forehead. “We can turn her back on for another trial run.”

Tony’s hands moved across the console, the movements practiced. Sharon stood behind him, looking up at the readings on the screen monitoring her own vitals.

“Is something wrong?” she asked, as the machine before them made another whirring noise.

“Calibration issues. There’s still the matter of recovering Steve’s body—his real body,” said Tony.

Reed had returned from the Arctic after seeing Namor only that morning, having agreed to meet with him concerning the body in his custody. Before their eyes, Reed explained, the body in the coffin had disappeared, though it had undeniably been Steve’s corpse.

“Meaning? He is alive, isn’t he?” Sharon asked.

Tony frowned, hesitating. Reed approached behind them, looking back and forth from the large holographic screen and his tablet, typing rapid-fire calculations as he spoke.

“It’s not so simple as that, I’m afraid. We believe Steve is in a state on spatial-temporal flux, unmoored in time, so to speak,” Reed explained. “But if our calculations are correct, the chronal tracers in your blood should be able to retrieve him to an optimal quantum state—”

“We know how to get him back, _alive_ ,” interrupted Tony, recognising Reed as he was about to launch into a lecture even he would have trouble parsing. “But it’s just a matter of finessing our measurements so that we recover him in the right condi—

Tony stopped, staring outside the window, where a helicarrier was hovering outside the glass walls of the Baxter Building.

Before Tony could make any sense of what was happening, the world had turned into a whirlwind of noise—glass shattering, the strong howling of winds thirty stories above the ground, the deep hum of the helicarrier’s engines. Tony ran and ducked for cover behind an overturned desk, amidst the shouting and the sound of gunfire and bullets ricocheting.

As HAMMER agents dropped in on lines, he recognised several other developments occurring at the same time. Several Avengers had run into the lab as Reed turned on the alarm, adding wailing sirens to the cacophony of noise. Steve’s shield hit one of the agents in the throat, before rebounding against a beam in time for Barnes to grab it out of the air. Natasha ran in behind him, covering his back with shots from her wrist gauntlets. Johnny Storm flew around the lab in a flaming streak as Sue raised her force fields around the time machine, while the Vision phased through the floor, bullets shooting right through his immaterial form.

A hand grabbed Tony’s wrist, and he pulled back his other arm reflexively to punch whoever it was in the face.

“Tony!” Sharon shouted at him. “Get a hold of yourself! We’re getting out of here!”

As much as it pained him to leave others behind to fight for him, Tony nodded, getting to his feet shakily. Sharon fired her pistol over their cover, three consecutive shots, followed by the dull thud of metal hitting flesh that told Tony she had hit her mark.

The others could take care of themselves, and give them enough time to escape. They ran out of the lab, making for the garage several floors above. Their footsteps rang hollowly in the empty stairwell, Tony counting the floor markers as they passed each one.

The garage was empty when they arrived, Nick Fury’s flying car blessedly unscathed. For the umpteenth time, as he frantically took the Mark V armor out of the trunk, he cursed the Skrulls for botching the Extremis armor, which would’ve made suiting up a breeze. Instead, he took the pile of armor parts in his arms and got in the back of the car as Sharon started the engine.

Tony had just about finished putting on the gauntlets by the time Sharon flew the car out of the building. He didn’t bother asking where she was flying them off to—the most important thing was putting as much distance as possible between them and HAMMER. He was adjusting the clasps of the chestplate when something collided against the side of the car, the force of the impact tossing him against the car door. Then the world upturned entirely as Sharon drove the car in a loop, narrowly avoiding the yellow streak that flew past them, hitting instead the building behind them in a fiery explosion.

“Please don’t do that again,” said Tony, as the miserable contents of his stomach threatened to make an encore appearance.

“We have company on our six!” Sharon yelled.

Tony blinked, and shook his head to get rid of the ringing noise in his ears. He looked behind them and saw two fliers on their tail, one of which he recognised as Karla Sofen, the new Ms Marvel, wearing Carol’s old costume. Her hands were glowing bright white, ready to hit them with another energy blast and knock them out of the sky.

“Put on your seatbelt, and bring the top down!” Tony shouted. As the car roof receded, he grabbed hold of the strip of leather and wrapped it around his arm. The armor was only half-on; if he fell out now, he could just about maneuver himself to the ground with the gauntlets, but he wouldn’t be able to take Sharon with him…

He aimed the gauntlet at the fake Ms Marvel, repulsor fire going toe to toe with her energy blasts. She was less than 20 feet behind, making it hard to miss, but between her flying and Sharon’s evasive driving, none of his return fire hit. Sharon was lowering their altitude, aiming for the city streets to limit Karla’s manoeuverability in the air. This high up, they were too much out in the open, too vulnerable; the only reason the helicarrier hadn’t yet shot them clean out of the sky was that Osborn needed both him and Sharon alive, and even that was tenuous goodwill that Tony wasn’t willing to place his bets on.

Sharon made a sharp gut-wrenching turn on 51st street, giving Tony a split-second window in Karla’s blind spot as she rounded the corner to follow after them. The repulsor fire hit her square in the chest, forcing her back against stone masonry of some office building.

Their moment of celebration lasted only a second, when what seemed like a flash of solid lightning barreled into the side of the car like a battering ram. In a rain of broken glass and civilian screams, the car crashed into the lobby of a hotel, rolling several times before skidding to a halt, the metal screeching gratingly against the marble floor.

Tony coughed, the taste of copper in his mouth. As he groggily blinked the blood out of his eyes, he could faintly make out the blur of Agent Carter, reaching to the backseat and shaking him by the shoulders. She was yelling something, but Tony couldn’t make out her words. As his vision dimmed to unconsciousness, he glanced across the wrecked entrance of the lobby, where the broad-shouldered figure of the Sentry hovered inches above the ground, clad in gold, eyes gleaming with cold fire.

The last thought that ran through Tony’s mind as he limply fell back into his seat was, quite accurately,  _We’re fucked…_

*

Code flowed in an endless stream before his eyes, infinite lines of zeroes and ones. Numbers, an endless stream of numbers, the purest and most perfect form of human expression, of language, incorruptible, familiar, safe…

 _But that wasn’t really true, was it?_ Tony thought, in whatever dreary haze of consciousness he currently occupied. Meaning cannot be conveyed without something being lost in the translation from human thought to language; there is no algorithm that can compress all possible data with one hundred percent efficiency—if a set of _n_ objects are put into _m_ containers with _n_ greater than _m_ —wait—let _R_ be the set of all sets that are not members of themselves—wait, no, that isn’t right either…

His head throbbed painfully, like too many nights with little to no sleep. His hands would shake slightly with fine trembling, betraying his wan, tired smile.

“ _Tony,” Steve says, “you should rest.”_

_The derivative in functions with instantaneous rates of change, dictating an indivisible unit of time—_

Sparks running through old circuits, jump-starting broken down wiring. The RT hummed through his veins, the skeleton Extremis left behind, hollow, _hollow_ , random synapses in his brain firing to replay half-forgotten film, dusting out the old ghosts in the machine—ghosts, and all of them had names…  

Entropy. That was it. Mathematics is the language of lowest entropy, a professor had once told him, a near perpetual motion machine of meaning in its efficiency.

But he’d been working as fast as he could, he had just needed a bit more time, the machine was nearly ready—

“ _Wipe it? This is your brain, Tony!” Pepper yells at him._ “ _Not some ipod that’s on the fritz!”_

_The process of thermodynamic entropy is irreversible. Disorder flows only in one direction; though it is mathematically possible to quantify the odds of a pane of shattered glass returning to a state of unbrokenness, that is not what happens—_

_"Damaged does not mean broken," he says. Sharon doesn't meet his eyes._

_“A gun would be faster and easier,” Maria says._

He had been trying to fix things again, he was just trying to make it all right again, everything would be okay if only Steve could come back.

_—a pane of shattered glass—disorder flows in only one direction, proof of the existence of the concept of time outside of human perception—_

Time. Tony had just needed a bit more time—Steve was still lost somewhere in time, unmoored, anchorless—

_Entropy is the primary pattern present in nature, distinct from order; whereas order must be imposed, entropy simply is. In trying to impose order in a world that renounced it at every turn, he becomes further alienated, further estranged, and only increases the chaos of the system. In trying to impose order and halt the increase of disorder, he works and he works and he works, an inefficient machine. In an isolated system—isolated—isolated—_

“ _You don’t have to do everything alone,” Rhodey says._

He had calculated the odds of success and defeat, formulated the probability of his waking nightmares, and for all his bravado Tony Stark was not a betting man, not in the slightest.

“ _You don’t have to be the one to do this,” Reed says._

He was lost somewhere, adrift, and there were a multitude of voices, cacophonous and loud, like heartbeats layered one of top of another. In the unyielding grey, the numbers swam around him like a river, a depthless body of water that swallowed him whole.

_In any thermodynamic function, a system proceeds from an initial state to a final state; in any process of conversion, work must be performed and energy degrades into heat. The process will continue until thermodynamic equilibrium is achieved. In a closed, isolated system, this equilibrium is the configuration of maximum entropy attained, heat and fire and death, death, death—_

It was cold, wherever this was. Cold and isolated and he was tired, so tired, he just wanted to rest, just wanted to sleep, he just wanted to see Steve again—

“ _Looking at him hurts,” Sharon tells him._

_Any thermodynamic process to bring a system to absolute zero is impossible in a finite number of steps—_

“ _Not yet, Tony,” says Steve. “Not yet.”_

*

“Let go of me, Nazi scum! I killed you, I fucking killed you!”

Tony woke in a haze of red, to the sound of Sharon’s furious howling, and opened his eyes. At first, he couldn’t see anything past the harsh white glare of light, reflected on numerous gleaming surfaces, but the voices that spoke around him were all dreadfully familiar. His hands were tied behind his back, affixed to a metal beam. The restraints made a clanging noise as he pulled against them, digging painfully into the soft skin of his wrists.

There was no sign of Reed or his family, so they must’ve escaped. They weren’t killed, or else their bodies would have been put on display, much like the Vision’s prone form right at the edge of the dais. Tony caught sight of two unconscious figures next to him, and realisation hit him like a punch to his gut. Maria was on the ground, collapsed on top of what must be Pepper in the Rescue armor.

“Ah, Stark. I’m glad to see you could join our little party, right in time for the main event,” said a dreadfully familiar voice from his left.

Osborn walked in, his hands held behind his back, while green-clad HAMMER agents flanked around him as his guard. Tony knew that they were airborne, and after looking around, he barely recognized the main atrium of a helicarrier, heavily modified by the addition of sinister blinking machines.

In the centre of the chamber, Tony saw the machine they’d been working on, the machine _he’d_ been building to bring back Steve, but cannibalised and modified to serve different means that what it had been assembled for. Computer screens came down from the ceiling to form a circle around three operating tables; two of them had a body strapped down to it, while the third between them was upraised on a platform, empty. Eerie green light shone down on each table, including the one that held—

“Sharon!” he yelled, trying to stand up, only to be pulled back by the manacles around his wrists.

Sharon was restrained to the table on the farthest right, and at the sound of his voice, she’d craned her neck up, an expression of desperation on her face. There were dark circles under her eyes, and her hair was matted down to her forehead with sweat. “Tony! Tony, you have to stop them! The Skull, he has Steve’s body and he wants to—”

Arnim Zola stood to the side of her table, and struck her across the face. “Quiet! Herr Skull has no time for your womanly hysterics!”

She glared up at Zola, full of rage and venom, and hissed, “I will kill you when I get out of here, Zola! I’ll kill you, and I’ll kill your precious master again, I’ll erase your fucking code so you never exist on this goddamned earth—”

Sharon stopped mid-tirade as a surge of electricity coursed through her. She screamed, fists clenched, her back curved upward in an arch, her whole body a taut bowstring pulling against the restraints as she bit back screams of pain. On the table opposite, Tony recognised the figure that must be the Red Skull, stuck in an artificial body much like the one Zola made for himself. The screen on his torso projected his red face and hateful yellow eyes, shimmering with static.

“Sharon!” Tony yelled, his chains rattling as he tried to stand, before the restraints pulled on his shoulders and forced him to jolt forward on his knees, his jaw crashing to the floor. He must’ve bit the inside of his cheek, because he could suddenly taste hot blood in his mouth.

Osborn turned to him, hands still clasped behind his back. He was grinning from ear to ear, and his eyes were positively manic. “Seeing you writhe around pathetically like this makes all the trouble you put me through worth it. In fact, this whole endeavour has paid off wonderfully,” he said gleefully. “You came into my city, and practically handed yourself over to me. Richards escaped, but now I have an excuse for the State Department to seize the Baxter Building. You’ve saved me the trouble of having to grovel to Doom for help.”

“Sharon!” he shouted again, blood trickling down the side of his mouth.

“The Skull was having trouble making that contraption of his work, but you’ve gone ahead and made it for us! All this, and it’s all thanks to you, Stark.”

But he was barely paying attention to Osborn’s gloating. His eyes were fixated on the scene in front of him, the green light of the machines casting an unearthly glow on everything. Sharon continued to fight against her restraints, but her struggles were growing weaker, until there was a brilliant, blinding flash of light and finally—

Finally—

As the green light dissipated, Tony could make out the outline of a third figure, who had appeared on the center table. The figure sat upright, looked to his left at Sharon’s unconscious figure, to his right at the Red Skull’s robotic mannequin, the screen now dead. He stood up from the table and walked several steps forward, looking down at his red gloved hands with triumphant fascination.

They had recovered him from the time stream still in uniform, though it was visibly worn and tattered.

“Steve!” Tony called out to him. Perhaps it was instinct, because before that image had always meant _friend_ and _brother,_ even when they were fighting on opposite sides. But when Steve Rogers’ body looked up at the sound of his voice, Tony instantly knew that was the wrong move to make.

The figure stalked slowly toward him, his gait menacing, his eyes predatory as they stared down at Tony.

“Skull,” said Osborn to his left, eyes narrowed and teeth bared wide like a shark’s grin. “Welcome back. I trust you find everything to be in working order? I’ve upheld my end of the bargain.”

“All in good time, Osborn. I believe I also have one other person to thank for this new body,” said a voice that was familiar and not at all. Tony felt his heart thud loudly against the arc reactor, as though in protest of it.

“Steve, come on. Answer me!”

“This building is under new ownership, Herr Stark! Surely you won’t be so rude as to deny welcome to its new tenant.”

“Steve—”

The Red Skull kneeled down and wrapped Steve’s hand around Tony’s throat, pulling him up to his feet. “I tire of your groveling. I am giving you my sincerest thanks, and you’re not even acknowledging them.”

It was wrong, it was _all_ wrong. There was a cruel set to his mouth, narrowed eyes that glinted red instead of blue. He smiled, but there was none of Steve’s warmth or kindness in it, only sharpness.

“Steve, you’re in there somewhere,” Tony said, his voice strained and gasping. “You’re stronger than this, you have to fight—”

He could feel consciousness slipping away as fingers dug in harder into his neck. He gasped weakly, choking as the weight of his body bore down on the hand around his throat, tight as any hangman’s noose, toes scraping uselessly on the floor.

"It’s not a matter of whether or not you could’ve saved him, Herr Stark. You killed Captain America just as surely as I did."

“D—don’t use his voice—”

"He was so ready to kill you before he died, Tony Stark," said the man who wasn’t Steve. He grinned, and there was nothing familiar in those blue eyes. "What makes you think this isn’t his will and mine finding common ground?"

“You lie—” Tony gasped.

Black crept at the edges of his vision.

“Oh, but I am not. This is one of the few things me and Rogers agree on. No one will mourn you, Tony Stark.” The grin that followed was more a simple baring of teeth than any motion of mirth. “He is gone, for I have subsumed him, and I can feel his hate coursing through my veins as though we were one.”

The Red Skull laughed, with Steve’s mouth, and Steve’s voice, and Steve’s laughter.


	6. disassembled

_Steve wakes up in broken starts and stops._

_A start. Steve wakes in his own bed in the middle of night, as the lights of a passing car shine briefly through the windows. The moment passes, and the room returns to its half-hearted dark, a quiet night illuminated by the soft glow of streetlamps. Sharon is curled up against him, warm and comfortable and safe, his fingers slightly tangled in her long blonde hair. He sighs contentedly, easily falling back to sleep._

_A stop. He stands at the front door of a pre-war apartment building that had seen better days. It was old and run-down, with boarded up windows and water-stained ceilings, a relic from the grimier, less glamorous past of the city. It reminds Steve of the tenement houses of his childhood, but not for long; those were full of people, full of the noise of too many families in a desperately small space, while this building was abandoned, dreary and silent. The stairs groan beneath his feet as he makes the walk-up._

_Tony looks up at him when he enters the room, slumped on the sofa, disheveled and weary. There are dark circles underneath his eyes, and he looks as though he hasn’t shaved in days. The bottle of whiskey is limp in his hands, mostly empty. Tony smiles weakly at him and offers the bottle, and Steve’s blood curdles in anger, helpless and futile. There are problems he can’t solve no matter how hard he punched or how much he pleaded, problems unaffected by any conviction he held. Useless no matter how strong or pure or noble they might be, because it wasn’t his own conviction that the solution hinged upon._

_(So how many times now has he been forced to watch loved ones waste away while he stood powerless to the side?)_

_A stop. It is the same scene, at a different time. Flames engulf the building, hungrily devouring old wood. Steve carries Tony’s limp body in his arms, hoping that he hasn’t inhaled too much smoke into his lungs._

_The fire blazes, red, red, casting a haze of red over everything._

_A start. He is in the war again, barking orders and trudging through the dirt, explosions blooming bright all round him. A young Nick Fury leads the charge, the Howling Commandos living up to their moniker with loud battle cries. He is in the war again, the war that comprised his present and the war that ended decades ago but, perhaps, the only period of time he can truly call home._

_A start. He’s in the gym of the mansion, the first mansion, the real mansion, sweat trickling down his forehead as he did his courses through the gymnastic rings. Iron Man comes in with some apology—Steve remembered, it had been before he knew Tony and armoured Avenger were one and the same, and they had argued about something irrelevant. Steve watches himself return the apology, for saying that Iron Man did not take his responsibility as an Avenger seriously, for accusing him of just being Stark’s bodyguard._

_He laughs bitterly to himself, and wonders how he ever missed that Iron Man was Tony for so long. He wonders what Tony thought of him, how he resisted throwing Steve’s pettiness in his face back then. He watches as Tony begins to tell him a secret, but without control of his body, Steve can only watch as the memory plays itself out and he interrupts Iron Man before he could say anything more._

_A start. He wakes up as a cold body on a slab while Tony sits on his bedside. He’s telling Steve a story, a familiar story, betrayal and sacrifice and regret tasting like ash in his mouth. A confession that was too little, too late. It wasn’t worth it, it wasn’t worth it, it wasn’t worth it._

_Steve wakes up in broken starts and stops, his heart stuttering, his lungs gasping for air._

*

Steve’s eyes blinked open, and everything he saw was tinged with red. It was as if there was a blindfold over his eyes, translucent fabric the colour of rust and drying blood. An odd ringing in his ears drowned out all noise, and his limbs moved without input.

He walked across the room, unfamiliar machinery gleaming all around him as he moved like an automaton.

“Steve,” a voice gasped out his name, somehow audible above the incessant ringing. “Steve, I know you’re in there somewhere—”

His body moving without his will, his mouth speaking harsh, unfamiliar words. His fingers were crushing something soft, pliant—his hands wrapped around a man’s neck. His grip tightened, cutting off the stranger’s air…and he smiled. Some great, terrible joy, _ecstasy_ , gripped his heart as he watched the stranger suffer, as he watched the lights dim in those eyes, almost as familiar as his own.

_You hate him, this false friend who killed you, who betrayed you, who left you, you hate him, you hate him—_

_I do,_ Steve thought. _He betrayed me. He left me._ _I hate him._

“He was so ready to kill you before he died, Tony Stark,” he heard his own voice say.

_I hate him for everyone he ever hurt, for hurting me—_

The red grew darker, deeper, until he was nearly blinded by it, like a film of blood spilling over his eyes, down his face, until he could taste it in his mouth—

_I hate him for leaving, I hate him for loving me so goddamned much but not loving me enough to trust me, to stay by my side—_

“No one will mourn you, Tony Stark,” he said, and laughed, and laughed.

_No._

_That's not true._

_I’ll mourn him._

_I miss him._

Steve pulled his hand back as if he had been burned, and Tony fell to the floor in a crumpled heap, unconscious. His head felt like it was stuffed with smoke, with live coals, every part of him suddenly engulfed in flames.

He staggered back, clutching at his forehead. A part of him was screaming, forcing him to his knees. The haze broke, now streaks of red crossing his vision, the claw marks of something dark and unclean digging into his ribs like barbed wire.

_no NO NO YOU WILL BOW TO ME ROGERS_

Steve gasped, a painful rush of air into his lungs. The voice continued to scream, dug its claws in deeper, but Steve grit his teeth against the pain. He had to force it out, hate and rage and poison coursing through his veins, stamp out the fire even as it burned the skin off his palms—

_YOU WILL NOT RESIST—_

One last heave.

_Get out._

A hand clasped him by the shoulder, shaking him. “Skull? Skull! What the hell’s the matter with you?!”

Steve stilled. Then he turned up, his eyes a clear, bright blue. He took only a moment to register the dumbfounded look of surprise on Osborn’s face before he decked him clean on the jaw, throwing backwards across the floor.

Everything seemed to happen all at once, leaving no time for Steve to remain confused. A barrage of gunfire shot out the gleaming computer consoles, severed wires dangling from the ceiling to shower the whole scene in sparks. He ducked for cover behind what looked like a mortuary table, taking stock of the situation, cold metal against the bare skin of his neck.

Above him, a monitor lit up in a blaze of static, before resolving into a familiar, hateful image. “Kill them!” the Red Skull screamed. “Kill them now!”

Soldiers moved in, bearing logos of a green hammer on their SHIELD uniforms, firing all around him. But in the confusion, he saw the faces of friends and allies. Reinforcements, he thought.

_Avengers._

The Red Skull’s screen above him blew out with a bullet from the Black Widow’s gun. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Hank Pym grow in size and free Sharon from where she’d been strapped down to another table. Sue Storm pulled up force fields over the unconscious heroes on the ground, and above, Sam swooped in on his wings, a man clad in red, white and blue hanging from his arms.

“Steve, catch!” Bucky yelled, as he threw the shield into his waiting hands.

The weight of the shield in his grip, Steve felt right for the first time since he woke up. The noise was nearly unbearable now, hails of bullets ricocheting off metal surfaces, the Red Skull’s face appearing on every one of the countless computer monitors of the lab.

He wound back his arm, torso twisting, and swung out the shield for a well-aimed throw at one of the monitors, rebounding off another, before flying back into his hand. A too-near explosion nearly rocked him off his feet, the resultant screen of smoke and debris making his eyes sting. Suddenly, a gleaming metal fist came flying, aiming at his face, and he brought the shield just in time.

“WHY MUST YOU ALWAYS GET IN THE WAY!?” The robot towered over him, nearly ten feet tall of twisted alloy, the Red Skull’s face glowing bright from the monitor on its torso. It brought its arms up for a second blow, hammering down its fist on the shield, forcing Steve to his knees a second time. “IT’S OVER, ROGERS! DIE! DIE LIKE THE WORTHLESS TRASH YOU ARE—”

With a grunt, Steve rolled to the side, the Skull’s fists pulverising the floor he occupied only a second ago. He struck the shield’s edge once, twice, against the hinges of the robot’s kneecap, toppling him off-balance. Then, bracing all his weight behind the shield, he slammed the shield’s face like a battering ram on its torso. The monitor cracked, the Red Skull’s deranged raving turning garbled and unintelligible.

His muscles strained against movement, atrophied from his long, fitful sleep, but with a final battlecry he rammed the shield against the Skull again, then sliced through the screen with the edge of his shield. He brought the shield down on the Skull again and again, glass breaking, the screech of machinery loud in his ears, until all that was left was a twisted heap of scrap metal.

Steve fell back, bracing himself against a dead console to get to his feet, shield up to face the next combatant. But the fight had already subsided in the interim, the last stragglers having fled after the Red Skull was defeated. Osborn was nowhere in sight. Steve surveyed the scene before him, allies helping each other to their feet. Hank was kneeling by where the Vision sat, propped up against the wall. Bucky and Sam were already making their way towards him, matching expressions of relief on their faces. Maria Hill stood shakily, her arms over the shoulders of Sue and…Pepper Potts?

With nauseating swiftness, the last of the adrenaline in his system made way for a sharp curl of dread.

Sharon’s voice rang out, making him turn as if on cue. “Steve!”

In the middle of the room, Sharon held Tony in her arms, unconscious and entirely still.

*

“But what’s wrong with him?”

Steve stood in front of the window, braced against the frame, and looked out to the meagre town lights of Broxton, Oklahoma. There was a streetlamp, here and there, but for the most part it was mostly lights peeking through the curtains of residences. On the horizon, he could just make out the floating city of Asgard, majestic and resplendent even in the dim light of dusk. Broxton was a peaceful, quiet town, but Steve found that the peace and quiet only agitated his nerves, when both were personally out of reach.

Tony was lying on the bed, limp, hands clasped loosely on top of his abdomen. Stephen Strange sat beside the bed, hands splayed on the sides of Tony’s head, thumbs resting lightly over his eyelids.

“Patience, Steven. The diagnostic spell won’t be finished for several more minutes. But my preliminary diagnosis is that Anthony’s mind has been under severe strain, and he’s fallen into a recuperative coma. What I am not certain about is if the damage is repairable.”

Donald Blake stood beside the doorway, leaning back against the wall, a wooden stick held in the crook of his elbow. Pepper Potts sat at the wooden desk at the far corner of the bedroom, resting her forehead on her hands while Maria Hill stood over her shoulder, a hand resting on the back of her chair.

The arc reactor was bright on the center of Tony’s chest, light casting shadows, highlighting the lines on his face. His expression was mildly distressed, his eyes shut tight as though he was stuck in a tired, restless sleep.

Not that he himself was any better off. Sharon had explained the situation to him, as succinctly as she could. After he died, the SHRA came into effect, Skrulls invaded Earth, and  _Norman Osborn_ was put in charge of SHIELD. There were some upsides—seeing Sharon again, and Bucky, and Sam and Natasha and all the rest of them. Realising Tony had given Bucky the shield, just like he asked him to. Pride blossomed in his chest when Sharon told him Bucky had taken up the mantle of Captain America since he died.

He let Bucky and the rest of the Avengers deal with the remainder of the Red Skull and HAMMER’s forces back in New York, while the rest of them moved to Broxton to recuperate, where they could rely on the protection of Asgard.

Still, he’d just been flung back and forth through time and space, reliving memories both good and bad, only to wake up in a fight and told he'd been dead for a whole year until they brought him back.

Sharon and Tony brought him back. And now Tony might be gone.

Steve tried to be less angry, less exasperated, but it was difficult when he’s barely had time to breathe. He was exhausted, short-tempered, and cross, because he wished he could be more surprised that he woke up to this. It was just like Tony to try and save everyone at the expense of himself.

“I don’t know much about the Extremis enhancile, but is that factoring in at all to his current condition?” asked Steve.

“The Extremis is out of his system,” Maria said. “He said...something about the framework it left behind, permanent physical changes and whatnot.”

“What about the arc reactor?” asked Sharon. “Tony told me it had components for self-repair, like a minor healing factor.”

“I have something similar in my body,” Pepper added, gesturing to the RT on her own chest. “I was hurt very badly, and Tony made this for me. It optimised my physical recovery, so would his…?”

“I believe his current arc reactor might be what’s keeping him stable,” replied Stephen. “It’s not the severity of his injuries, but rather of the mental strain he’s undergone. His mind is trying to hold itself together without exacerbating the damage already incurred.”

“So, Tony’s brain is essentially a computer, and what happened here is that his computer brain shut down instead of overheating,” said Steve drily. “Do I have that right?”

Stephen nodded. “He was working with a damaged system to start with, and the physical toll of the past few weeks—months perhaps, if we count the ordeal of the invasion—have all compounded together into his current condition.”

“The drive he had me recover in Austin,” Hill piped in suddenly. “He said it’s a backup of his brain that he made with Extremis, and that we would’ve used it after his brain delete. Would that fix him?”

“I’m not entirely certain,” Stephen replied, looking contemplative. “The autolobotomisation process wasn’t carried out completely. As of right now, his brain can download the information to restore the memories he’s already lost, but there’s no telling whether that in itself would bring him back.”

“Why did anyone allow him to delete his brain in the first place?” asked Steve, a note of warning in his voice.

“Tony forced himself to build the machine that brought you back, even though he only had half a brain,” Hill answered.

Part of Steve wanted to laugh, because wasn’t that just so typical of Tony goddamned Stark. Instead, his anger poured out in bitter asides, uncharacteristic viciousness that had no other outlet except for words. “And no one thought to, I don’t know, stop the workaholic from making his severe brain trauma even worse?”

Hill narrowed her eyes dangerously at him; she’s never had any qualms calling him out before, so it’s no surprise that she would go toe to toe with him on this. “Don’t lash out on me, Rogers. You weren’t there for any of it. You think I enjoyed having to deal with the brunt of Tony Stark’s martyr complex as it played out in real time?”

“I’m just saying it didn’t have to be him, making the machine. There’s a whole team of geniuses  who could’ve done it instead—Reed could’ve built it on his own!”

“This is rich coming from the guy who was beating him to death last time you saw him,” she retorted, in sharp tones that were intended to cut. Her words caught him by surprise, leaving him breathless for a moment.

“He’s still my friend, Hill,” he said in a strained voice.

Hill laughed unsympathetically at the barely restrained anger of his words, at the unintentional implication of violence in his curled fists and tensed jaw. “Tony Stark with half a brain is still Tony Stark. You don’t exactly have a stellar track record of stopping Tony when he’s being self-destructive and well-intentioned.”

Steve flinched back as though Hill had struck him, but he bit his tongue against any further reply, because he knew she was right. Everything was always easier in hindsight, and he had no room to judge.

He felt a hand on his arm, and turned to see Sharon looking up at him. She shook her head, a melancholy expression on her face that was equal parts apology and admonishment.

“I was the one who asked Tony to come in, Steve. I wanted to save you,” she said, in a sad, kind voice. “ _We_ wanted to save you. He was doing what he thought he needed to do, what with the whole mess with Osborn, when I got him to help me. Then he decided you were more important.”

Steve’s eyes widened. “I never wanted—Tony’s like this because of me.”

“No, Steve,” Sharon said firmly. “If nothing else, at least allow him the fault and dignity of this being his own choice.”

She was right, and so he tried to rein in his frustration somewhat, channel it somehow. “If he went to all that trouble to help me, it’s only fair I return the favor,” he said.

"His consciousness is still there—incomplete but there. I know Anthony doesn't believe in the existence of souls, but his...what we know essentially as the base quintessence of Tony Stark has withdrawn to the innermost rooms of his self, where none of us can reach him by any normal means,” Stephen said.

Steve nodded, the bare inklings of a plan forming in his mind. “Abnormal means, then?”

“I believe there is a way. I’ll be needing some chalk, and all the candles you can find,” Stephen answered, tapping a finger to his lips. “I will be performing a medical procedure.”


	7. (what we talk about when we talk about)

****The basement air was stale and damp, the universal smell of basements everywhere. But this time it was mixed with the scent of burnt wax and smoke. Dozens of lit candles were arranged around a large pentacle, drawn on the concrete floor with white chalk. At the head of the circle, Stephen sat on his knees, with Tony’s head cradled in his lap. Tony’s hands were pulled up over his chest, resting over the arc reactor. Steve sat in the circle by his side, as though Tony was simply lying on a hospital bed and Steve was  a visitor.

Maria frowned. She stood outside the circumference of the circle, looking down on the pentacle. “Rogers, you just basically came back from the dead yourself. Are you sure you should—”

“I’m fine,” Steve said, saying the words to himself as much as to Maria. By the expression on her face, it hardly did anything to assuage her skepticism. “I’ll be fine.”

“As long as I maintain contact with him,” said Stephen, closing his eyes, pressing two fingers to Tony’s temples, “no harm will befall the Captain.”

“But still,” said Maria, “given what he’s just been through, he’s hardly in any state to help anyone, least of all mentally.”

“Tony needs someone with strong psy-training, who he has a very strong bond with,” replied Sharon. She stood leaning against the wall, her arms crossed across her chest. “Someone strong enough to not get lost in Tony Stark’s head.”

Pepper’s eyes widened in alarm. She turned to Maria and put a hand on her elbow. “Is that possible?”

Stephen sighed with practiced long-suffering. “Again, as long as I am here, no physical harm can befall the captain. Now, close your eyes. Take a deep breath.”

Even as he did what he was told, Steve couldn’t help but ask, “How will I know what to do?”

“I suspect, Captain, that you are more capable of answering that question than any of us here. If you want my expert advice, Tony will need...a reason to come back...”

The very instance Stephen stopped speaking, the spell took hold, and he felt as though he were being submerged, the cold concrete and smell of burning candles suddenly giving way to nothing. The all-too physical sensation was not unlike drowning, as the omnipresent pressure was accompanied by a sharp tug pulling him downwards by his torso, the magic catching like a hook on his ribcage. He opened his eyes with a gasp, only to narrow them against a stinging wind and an unexpected glare of light.

He was lying down in a desert, a vast plain of sand and stone and endless orange skies. The sand, when he ran curious fingers through it, was fine, flowing through his hands like water. But there was no heat, no sun beating down the back of his neck, and it was perhaps this incongruity between what his eyes told him and what he felt that that confirmed to him most absolutely—none of this was real.

There was a lot to be said, that the fact that Tony’s mental condition manifested itself as a desert without end.

Almost as if the act of thinking about him was a summoning call, Steve heard a shifting noise behind him. He stood to his feet and turned around. Tony was sitting in the sand, his knees pulled up to his chest as he leaned back against the Iron Man armor, half-buried in the sand like some lost monument, or maybe a tombstone. Steve recognised the grey hulking model as the Mark I. Tony held the faceplate in hand, holding it over his face like a mask, before peering over the top of it. He pulled it down, slowly, tentatively. Like he expected Steve to disappear at any moment.

Tony was wearing his usual workshop clothes, a black tank and jeans, black mechanics gloves. His feet were bare, his toes curling into the sand. Even in this mindscape, there was the unfamiliar circle of light on his chest, bright and cold and foreign.

“Tony,” Steve said, and there’s a crack in his voice, his throat suddenly dry. None of it was real, and yet, this was the first time they were seeing each other face to face, their first conversation since the last on the helicarrier, right before Steve died.

“Why you?” Tony asked, a note of disbelieving laughter in the question. “Why is it always you?”

Steve frowned. “I don’t understand.”

Tony put the faceplate down to his lap, staring at its empty eyeholes with it. “I have plenty of ghosts to choose from.”

“I’m not a ghost.”

“So why are you here?”

“I’m here to bring you back.”

“Am I forgetting things again?”

“What? No,” Steve said, and there was a thread of this conversation that he was definitely missing, but he needed to plow on. He suspected a straightforward approach was probably his best bet anyway. “I’m here to bring you home. Your mind shut down and you’re stuck in mental limbo.”

Tony looked at him, his eyebrows raised up on his forehead in surprise as though he’d been expecting Steve to say something else. “Mental limbo?”

“You were trying to save everyone from Osborn by deleting your brain. Then you stopped to bring me back from the dead,” said Steve flatly. “Thanks for that, by the way.”

“You—you’re real?” Steve couldn’t tell whether the stutter in his voice was hope or fear. It might’ve been both.

Steve stepped forward, until he was right in front of Tony. He knelt down on one knee, his brow furrowed, as he held Tony’s face in his hands so that they looked each other right in the eye.

“I’m real. I’m here to bring you back.”

“How are you here?”

“Strange. Magic. He said you needed something—someone to help you find your way back,” Steve replied. He expected Tony to refute him and demand proof, scoff at the mere mention of magic, but to his surprise, Tony’s only response was to steel his expression and nod.

“You believe me?” he asked.

Tony lowered his eyes and nodded again. “I’ve imagined you so many times,” Tony answered, “but not once did you ever try to lie to me.”

Steve didn’t know what to say to that admission. He rarely encountered this Tony, vulnerable and readily honest. He pulled his hands away from Tony’s face, sitting back on his haunches. It couldn’t be this simple.

“So you’ll come back?”

Tony rested back against the armor behind him, genuine confusion on his face. “Why?”

“What do you mean?”

“What would I be going back to, Steve?”

“Why wouldn’t you come back?” The question came out confused and not a little incredulous, a hint of anger he couldn’t quite curb nesting themselves in the words.

Tony seemed taken aback by Steve’s sudden vehemence, but answered him in a matter-of-fact voice. “I’ve fulfilled my responsibilities. My brain is corrupted. The data that I hadn’t managed to erase should be largely irretrievable, and even if it still was I have you guys to count on to take care of Osborn.”

“I’m not doing this to help you with your bad decisions, Tony. We need you to come back.”

“But you’re back already. What do they need me for?”

“I don’t see what my return has to do with yours,” replied Steve.

“You’re back. Everything will be fine, now,” said Tony, as though stating the obvious.

“So you’re just going to give up?”

“I’m not giving up,” said Tony, sounding slightly annoyed. “I did my best.”

Steve blinked. This must’ve been what Strange meant.

He had to believe that Tony didn’t want to die. Not that not wanting to die was peculiar. Steve didn’t want to die either, mostly. But not wanting to die wasn’t exactly the same as wanting to live. And even putting aside that he just effectively came back from the dead—their lifestyle wasn't exactly one that particularly lent itself to longevity. Yet with each close call, each near-death experience, Tony had come back, time after time, with all the mustered tenacity of a man who clung to life just to spite death.

But it seemed that spite was no longer a sufficient motivator. He needed something else to convince Tony to come back.

“You know, Raymond Carver’s written a story about you. Something about knights in armor and vulnerabilities.”

Tony blinked at the apparent non-sequitur. “I—Carver?”

“Knights and heart conditions,” he barrelled on, ignoring Tony’s comment. “I’m pretty sure he was talking about you.”

“And what did he say about me, exactly?”

“He wrote a story about a man who fixed people’s hearts but didn’t know how they worked. About a man who was afraid of love and death, who fantasised about encasing himself in armor so nothing could ever hurt him.”

“Where are you going with this, Steve?”

“Those armoured knights in the old days...some of them died in their armor. Suffocated and died from heatstroke.”

There’s a pause, before Tony answered. “Well, they just didn’t have proper ventilation systems back then.”

Steve snorted. “Always got an answer for everything, don’t you, Tony?”

“You bet, Cap. I skipped all my college Lit classes anyway,” Tony replied casually, kicking at the sand at his feet. “Carver,” he added, scoffing.

Steve leaned forward, and splayed a hand on the circle of light on Tony’s chest. The RT was unfamiliar to him, a foreign object, but it had obviously become enough of a permanent fixture while he was away, for Tony to have taken it with him to this desert. But he couldn’t say he was surprised, much; Tony has always had heart problems, and here once again was a physical manifestation of it, right in the center of his chest. It was irony and cruelty and Tony’s morbid sense of humor, all in one.

“This is new. Do you have to charge your heart again, like you used to?”

Tony shook his head. “This one’s more of a battery. All the power and longevity of a star,” he said, smiling self-deprecatingly. “So don’t worry. This time I can’t ever forget to charge it anymore.”

“Better than the chestplate then.”

“I’m always an improving model.”

Frustration took the better of him. “You’re not a machine, Tony!”

Tony visibly swallowed, and his grip on the faceplate suddenly tightened, his knuckles white. “Why do you even want me to come back?”

Steve opened his mouth to answer, but before he could get the words out, there was a sudden gust of wind whipping the sand about them, and a loud, humming noise coming from behind him. Steve stood up, held a hand protectively in front of Tony and turned around.

They were massive machines, with the largest one at the forefront, just a few feet away from them. The machines hovered several feet off the ground, their mechanical hum dying down to silence. Steve didn’t know how such huge objects were able to come so close to them without their noticing, as though they just instantaneously materialised out of thin air. They reminded him of a novel he read when he was a kid—titanic machines, higher than many houses, walking engines of glittering metal that moved with unnerving grace. Tangles of steel ropes came out of the main bulk of their bodies like countless menacing arms. Bright circles of light dotted their frames, all of them boring into him like so many eyes. There was an air of malice about them that left no doubt as to what they were: weapons.

Behind him, Tony had gotten to his feet, looking up at the machine in front of them with wide eyes.

“Where have I...these are nth-gen Stark Titanomechs,” he said in a hushed whisper to himself.

Everything about the machines screamed wrong to Steve. “Tony—”

”But the design's all wrong. I don't think I've even built them yet. Just sketches."

“Tony, we have to leave, we have to move,” Steve said. He didn’t know any of the rules that governed this world. He didn’t know what to do or where’d they go or whether it was even possible to die in this desert, but he knew that they had to get away from these creatures.

The machine nearest them made a sharp whirring noise, the unmistakable noise of weapons charging up, and the air suddenly smelled of ozone.

He grabbed hold of Tony’s wrist and tried to pull him away. “Tony, we have to leave!”

But Tony just stayed in place, looking up at the Titanomech with blank wonder. He reached forward with one hand, as though to caress the machine’s face.

“It’s asking if I want to destroy everything,” he said in a hushed whisper.

There was a sudden, high-pitched, screaming noise, and light poured out of the Titanomechs, turning the whole world white. Steve raised his arms to shield his eyes, and though there was no pain, it was an odd feeling, to feel yourself disintegrate particle by particle. It was a moment of disorientation that lasted either a second or an eon, a moment when everything was just that empty white, before giving way to a scatter of static, like the screen of an old television changing channels.

Steve lowered his arms and looked around.

The desert was gone. In its place was the gray deck of the helicarrier in flight, though with the dying light of sundown in the background, everything was the same distinctly red hue as before. The air was cooler than the desert’s, although how much of that was simply in his head due to the change of visual cues was hard to gauge.

The large, ominous machines were also gone. They were the only two aboard, a helicarrier devoid of its usual activity, none of the hustle of agents going about their duties, the military cadence of boots marching to and fro. The only noise breaking the silence was the whirring of the engines.

“Are you okay?” Steve asked, his voice echoing across the empty deck. He found Tony standing several feet away away, frightfully near the edge of the helicarrier.

Tony was wearing his uniform as the former Director of SHIELD, his messy mechanic’s clothes replaced by the black leather jumpsuit, the white gloves and holster. He looked mostly discomfited in it, pulling at the collar of the uniform snug around his neck. The outfit hardly suited him, in Steve's opinion, too conservative and confining for the person he was.

Steve looked down at his own body. He wasn't wearing his uniform anymore, but instead he was just wearing his casual clothes—it was his favorite shirt, soft, worn blue cotton, and Steve wondered why Tony's projection of him had changed. He didn’t mind the outfit, but he missed the weight of the shield in his hand.

"I never liked being director,” Tony finally said, as idly as though they were talking about the weather, looking down at his white gloves.

"I didn’t think you would."

Tony looked up at him with a raised an eyebrow. "But you bought that it was all a power grab, for me."

Steve peered over the edge of the deck. They were high up, hovering in place above the clouds, rolling beneath them like an ocean. Steve had no idea where they were, if they were anywhere. Maybe the helicarrier was the extent of this projection. "No, I knew you didn't want power. You wanted control, even over the things you shouldn't have."

"A man who lives his whole life with power is never want for more," Tony replied, with not a little self-deprecation. "I guess it's a matter of allocating vices."

"Hubris?” Steve suggested.

“Greed, though I’ll be the first to admit I’m not want of that one either.”

“What did a man who had everything want more of?”

As though in response to his question, their surroundings began to transform. There was no bright light to obscure everything. Neither he or Tony ever moved, nor did he ever lose sight of him, but their surroundings changed around them with a shimmering haze, like countless, out-of-focus puzzle pieces slotting into place, until they were no longer on the helicarrier, but on the topmost level of Stark Tower.

It was late at night, this time, the tower looking out to a dark blue sky mottled with the grey of clouds, but New York below them was dark, as though someone had turned off all the lights of the city.

Tony stood against the dark window, leaning forward to rest his forehead on the cool glass. To Steve’s sudden surprise, there were vague phantom shapes that moved around them, less like ghosts and more like afterimages caught at the corner of your eye, disappearing after mere moments. Jarvis dusting the furniture on the coffee table. Thor and Jan sitting next to each other on the living room couch. Wanda Maximoff and the Vision walking down the hallway with their arms intertwined. Clint Barton sitting on the kitchen table as he changed arrowheads. Carol Danvers flying in with Jessica Drew alighting beside her. Luke Cage standing by the window, holding his daughter as he rocked her to sleep.

“I just wanted everyone to be happy. To be safe,” Tony murmured quietly. Steve stepped forward through wisps of memories, waving his hand in front of him to make them dissipate like smoke, until he stood behind Tony, a hand on his  shoulder. He turned Tony around to face him, gently but firmly, pressing his shoulders on the glass behind him.

Tony looked up at him, brows furrowed, the deep lines on his face indicating distress and confusion.

“When are you going to understand that not everything has to be about you?” Steve said, a slight tremor in his voice. “You are not responsible for the world.”

“I was doing what was right.”

“You were doing what you thought was right, you were doing what you wanted—there’s no difference, Tony! Why did you ever think you needed to do everything alone? That you were the only one allowed to sacrifice anything?”

“You never listened to me,” Tony replied back, a hint of frustration in his voice, and Steve grasped frantically at that thread. An angry Tony was better than the calm detachment, the casual fatalism. It was never like Tony to be so uncaring.

Steve wanted to be right; he needed to believe that Tony wasn’t so broken yet that he wouldn’t fight back for his convictions.

“We could’ve worked together and solved everything if you’d listened to me,” Tony yelled. “I never intended to lose everything!”

“You would’ve done what you felt you needed to do, regardless of what anyone else thought!”

Tony bit his lip, and Steve continued, “I didn’t want to fight you. It was killing me, having to fight you.”

“I—”

Steve cut him off, and held Tony’s shoulders tighter. “Come back with me, Tony,” he repeated.

“Of everyone,” Tony replied, “of _anyone,_ you have the most reason to hate me.”

“You’re not asking for an apology. I’m not here to forgive you. Just…just come back with me.”

“Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I did just think you up after all,” he said, speaking more to himself than Steve.

Everything around them shimmered once more, their surroundings changing, and it takes Steve a second to recognise the ruins around them after they materialised.

It was the ruins of old mansion. The old team portrait was hanging on the wall, slightly askew but mostly untouched by the destruction. But the image was blurred, a mess of colors that Steve recognised only because they were so familiar to him. Dust still hung in the air, thick and cloying, as though the fire that burned everything down had been only yesterday.

Steve was still holding Tony up, pressing him against the wall, bits of plasterwork chipping off and falling to their feet.

Tony averted his eyes, and Steve followed his line of sight. He looked down and saw he was wearing his uniform, old and battered. His torso was stained with dried blood at the exact place where he was shot, and he felt cold. This was Tony’s answer. It was distrust. What if Steve was lying, and Tony came back to a world where Steve was still dead?

“There are blanks in my mind that I can’t—I don’t remember them. Do you know what it’s like to struggle with guilt over things you can’t even remember? When your own mind betrays you with things you want and know can never be real?”

“I’m not some memory you can erase, Tony,” Steve said. “I’m real. I’m here with you. You can’t make me leave you behind.”

He looked up at him, imploringly. “I can prove it, if only you’ll come back with me.”

There was loss there, in his eyes, wide with what looked like fear, and tenuous hope. “You don’t need me.”

“You think it’s some big sacrifice for you to just leave everything behind, that we’ll all be better off without you. But you’re just running away again.”

“I’m not running away,” Tony said simply.

“Then why?”

"I...I killed you," Tony said, "I never would've gone through with any of it if I had known it would kill you."

"Why, Tony? You still don't think you were wrong! What makes me different than any of the others you hurt? What of the others who suffered because you thought what you were doing was right!?"

"Because I love you, Steve! I sold my soul because I loved you, and my soul should've been worth at least that much!"

Steve was struck silent at the confession, his thoughts completely derailed. It was obvious from the shock on Tony’s face that the admission caught him similarly off-guard, that he regretted the words immediately from the moment he said them.

“I guess,” he started to say to Steve’s continued wordlessness, his voice breaking midway, “my greatest mistake was in thinking my soul could ever be worth that much.”

“You wanted to save me? Save us?”

“I wanted...I just wanted to keep everyone safe."

“I can’t forgive you just because you were well-intentioned,” Steve said.

Tony looked up and stared straight at im, eyes hard and brittle. “Don’t forgive me. I’m not sorry for what I did, because it was right. I did what I had to do. But I do regret that you died. I never wanted you to die, and I will always regret that. I will always regret you.”

When Steve didn’t reply, Tony continued, speaking with a frenzy that bespoke of a man finally imparting important truths, long repressed, reasoning that he might as well give more rope to hang himself with. “And now here I am, giving you some shitty last will and testament for why I had to do this. Hell, _nothing_ went the way it was supposed go. The Skrulls invaded and nearly won Earth, because of me. I paved the way for Osborn to rise to power. Everything I sacrificed was in vain—I sacrificed everything and it only made things _worse_. Then I did it all over again, hoping it was worth something the second time around.”

Steve clenched his hands tightly into fists, nails digging into his palms. “But do you ever consider that these things are not just yours to sacrifice?”

“That’s irrelevant.”

“Irrelevant?!”

“You asked me why I did what I did and I can’t answer you. I don’t even remember most of my reasons—I only remember that I had them. I remember being so cold and so tired and I was seeing you. I saw you. You were one of many ghosts, out there in the snow. Then Sharon came and rescued me, and told me we could bring you back.”

“How do you manage to do this all the time?” Steve finally answered, sounding both heartbroken and exasperated. “How do you manage to make self-sacrifice so selfish?”

Tony laughed. “It’s my real superpower.”

“So you admit it?”

“Of course I do. Of course it was selfish, Steve. All my decisions always were. If I could bring you back, then it was at least...it could at least be my apology. I wanted to bring you back. I wanted to see you again.”

Before Tony finished speaking, Steve had already stepped forward, to wrap his arms around Tony in a tight embrace, his eyes closed. He couldn’t see it, but he knew their surroundings were changing around them, images whirling like a tempest, a sorting algorithm run amok. With each scene that flew past them, Steve could not help but be reminded of his own recent ordeal, flung back and forth through his memories, violently, helplessly.

But this was different—a prison that only Tony could devise, Steve thought ruefully. These different images were not remembrances or flashbacks. Memories could only be relived in remembrance, but to revisit a place—you are not the person you were when you were here last. You will never be that person again. He revisited places to give an outlet for regret, for _hope_ , that something new, something different might happen on the second iteration, or the third, or the hundredth.

Steve held him tighter, and he felt Tony’s hands dig into his back, blunt nails digging into the hollow beneath his shoulder blades.

The desert, the tower, the mansion. For Tony they were all settings of personal relevance, of great import and impasses, of heartrending regret. Hiding places. And in this mindscape where he could no longer tell what was real and what wasn’t, each one coalesced into form, as malleable and unpredictable as Tony himself.

But if what Stephen Strange told him was anything to go by, this was…all of it was Tony. Different fragments of a man loosely, barely, desperately held together, until they arrived at the crossroads they were at now. There’s a path Tony can choose to reassemble the pieces. There’s a path where he can just let it all fall apart completely.

Tony didn’t want to die, but that wasn’t the same as wanting to live.

They were both caught in the stream of Tony’s consciousness and it wasn’t so much a stream as it was a river, a raging torrent threatening to wash both of them away.

But Steve can be a stalwart anchor; he’s there to help them both back to shore. Tony is selfish, and must be given a reason to come back.

Steve can be that reason.

“I died. I’m sorry,” he said, saying the words directly into Tony’s ears. “I’m sorry I fought you. I’m sorry I left you alone.”

“How do I know this is real? What if this is just my brain acting up again?” Tony laughed weakly. “My brain likes to do that.”

Steve pulled back and kissed him, a soft press of his lips on Tony’s. Eyes closed, his hands moved to tangle in Tony’s hair, thumb on the line of his jaw. Tony’s mouth was warm, and the whole thing was almost chaste, but there’s an urgency behind it, a desperation to make Tony believe him. Tony’s own hands moved up to cradle the back of his neck to deepen the kiss.

After a few moments, Steve broke the kiss and spoke against Tony’s mouth. “This is real. Just let me prove it. Come back with me.”

Steve opened his eyes, only to find that Tony had closed his own. Tony was hesitant, but he'd never been very good at saying no to Steve.

“Steve, I—”

But before Tony could finish his statement, Steve felt a tug around his waist, like a metal hook at the base of his spine, pulling him away. He met Tony’s eyes, wide with surprise, before the world ripped apart.

*

The mystical plane dissolved in a swirl of color, and Steve’s consciousness returned into his body with bruising force. He looked around, the first thing he noticed was the spray of blood on the floor, the splatter washing away the chalk, breaking the circle of the pentacle.

Outside the circle of candles, Stephen stood propped up against the wall, a hand putting pressure on the wound on his side.

“Captain, to your left—!”

There was a flash of white in the corner of his eye. In a split second, he put his left hand up to block the wickedly clawed hand aiming for his stomach, only for it to phase through his arm. He stepped to the side, but not quickly enough to avoid being grazed by the claws on the side of his ribs.

“Oh man, Osborn is _not_ gonna love this.”

A  ghostly looking figure stood before him, wearing what looked like a bug-eyed gas mask, his clothes hanging on his thin frame like tattered bandages. Obviously a hostile. Blood ran down his side, trickling down his leg, but it was a shallow wound. Steve assumed his fighting stance, hands up, already thinking up strategies to take the enemy down. He wasn’t the first enemy Steve’s fought with phasing abilities. He just had to figure out how to bypass his powers somehow.

The unknown man launched forward, one clawed hand directly aiming for his eyes. In the split second instance that the man materialised to attack, Steve ducked down under his outstretched arms, then rammed his fist solidly into the man’s chest. His enemy staggered backwards, and Steve spun around to aim a kick at his knees, taking his legs out from beneath him. The man fell on his back onto the mass of candles at the far end of the circle, dematerialising in time so that he wasn’t burned.

His attacker stood up quickly, and lunged at him again. Steve threw a punch at his nose, only for his fist to go right through through the man’s head, but he managed to deflect the claw aiming for his throat. He caught the materialised hand by the wrist before driving his elbow sharply upwards, breaking the attacker’s arm.

“Fucking hell!” the man yelled, dematerialising out of his grip before Steve could knock him out. He gripped at his arm, bent at a painful angle, and stumbled back, putting several feet between him and Steve.

Steve stood in front of Tony’s prone form within the pentacle, shoulders ramrod straight. “What are you here for? What do you want?”

The man got back up to his feet again, but didn’t make to attack a third time. “They didn’t say anything about the rest of you,” he said, sounding frustrated. “I’m just here to kill Stark!”

“If you want to kill Tony, you’d have to go through me.”

“...Well, I can do that.”

The man sank through the floor, and disappeared. Steve carefully turned, scanning the surroundings, looking for the telltale wisp of white as he spoke. “You have nothing to gain by continuing this. I won’t let you. Just leave while the rest of your limbs are still intact.”

“I can’t go back empty-handed, and there are old scores to settle between me and Stark,” said a voice directly behind him. Steve whipped around to face him, but his backhanded strike went through the assassin.

The man stayed intangible as he came up through the floor and thrust a clawed, incorporeal hand through his torso. “Besides, I could be the guy who kills Captain America,” he said, twisting his palm upward, as though to cradle his heart.

Steve looked down at hand in his chest and didn’t flinch. “I’ve just come back from the dead, son,” he said. “How much do you wanna take your chances that I can’t do it again?”

The attacker didn’t move, but he was obviously hesitant, unsure of whether to call on Steve’s bluff. “Why does this matter so much to you? You were trying to kill the guy last I—”

“You. Will. Leave.”

The other man gave the barest hint of a wince, but before either of them could do anything, they’re interrupted by the sound of feet rushing to the doorway. “Rogers!” Maria shouted, and the attacker turned at the sound of her voice just as her knife shot through the air, whizzing straight through his head to embed in the opposite wall. Steve took the chance to step away, removing the dematerialised hand out of his body. From the doorway, Sharon had stepped from behind Maria and was now walking towards them, a pistol in hand, emptying a clip through the attacker’s head.

With a growl, the attacker turned to Sharon, baring his claws and preparing to lunge, when another voice rang out and stopped him in his tracks, “You’re here for me, Ghost!”

Inside the pentacle, Tony was upright on his knees. He had one hand clutching at his side, his breathing labored, and there was blood running from his nose, but his expression was determined, furiously glaring. The light from the candles danced on his face, setting his eyes alight.

He unbuttoned his shirt open, baring the arc reactor at Ghost, which grew painfully bright, before emitting a pulse of light. Ghost’s shimmering form glitched like a faulty hologram, before he turned solid and real. Before anyone else was able to fully register what had happened, Steve had yanked Maria’s knife from the wall and sent it flying behind him, piercing Ghost in the back of his shoulder.

“Fuck!” Ghost screamed as he fell to the ground on all fours. Steve stepped forward and pulled him up by his mask to face him.

“You will never return here. You’ll slink back to Osborn or whoever the hell sent you and tell him that Steve Rogers is coming for you,” he said, voice calm and level until he roared, “NOW GO!”

Steve threw Ghost back, who clambered away,  knocking into candles in his haste to put distance between him and Steve. He clicked the device on his belt, and suddenly he was ensconced in white light. The light died, and Ghost disappeared, leaving behind a bloodied knife to clatter to the floor.

At the same time as the knife, Tony pitched forward on his hands, coughing up blood. Steve rushed to his side, while Sharon and Maria ran to attend to Stephen. He pulled Tony by his shoulders so that he was sitting back against his chest. For the first time since they both came back to the real world, Steve and Tony’s eyes met.

“I’d almost forgotten how scary you can be, sometimes,” said Tony weakly.

“He caught me in a bad mood.”

“You usually just get all quiet and sulky when you’re in a bad mood.”

Steve looked at Tony’s tired smile. “You came back.”

“You told me to.”

“You certainly took your time.”

Tony looked down on his chest, where the arc reactor flickered, much dimmer than before. He touched the circle with tentative fingers. “You weren’t lying.”

Steve put his hand on top of Tony’s and interlaced their fingers together. “I meant every word I said.”

Verbal assurances seemed paltry after what they’d just been through, after the time they spent together in each other’s head, but Steve obliged the unspoken request anyway. It wouldn’t hurt to say the words out loud, right now when he could feel Tony’s heartbeat steady against his chest, where the callus-roughened hand he held in his was warm and real.


	8. epilogue

“How much do you remember?”

Tony snapped out of his reverie, looking up at his visitor with surprise. Sharon sat down beside him on the bench where he’d been sitting, out on the porch, lost in quiet contemplation as he stared at Asgard on the horizon. It seemed absurd, seeing the realm of gods hovering within a stone’s throw of Broxton, Oklahoma.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you,” she said, but he waved away the apology. Her hair was splayed over her shoulders, free from its usual ponytail, and there were circles under her eyes dark enough to rival his own.

“Nah, I was just…distracted.”

“I figured that out myself.”

He gave her a tired smile. Between Stephen’s magic and the harddrive, his brain was mostly back to working condition, or as much as it ever was anyway—jury’s still out if it ever worked properly in the first place, or so Maria had opined to him shortly after he woke up. But he had been so focused on deleting certain parts of his brain that some data had become corrupted, completely irretrievable, lost forever.

“I remember enough,” he said slowly. “I remember Osborn. I remember you saving me out there in the snow. I don’t remember the database though.”

The corner of Sharon’s mouth quirked upward. “I think we can all agree that’s for the better.”

Tony looked down at his hands, at the rough whorls of his fingertips. He spoke then, his words nearly a whisper. "I don't remember how he died."

There was a pause, a silence peppered by the thunder in the distance. "You risked your life to bring him back," she said finally. “If you remember the snow, you remember that.”

"I know that. I remember”— _a purgatory of sand, the sharp whine of repulsor tech, Steve’s mouth against his within the tempest—_ ”I remember Steve bringing me back. But I don’t remember how he died, or how I was after it.”

“He’s back now. If you keep beating yourself up about it, then I’m gonna feel obligated to keep beating myself up about it. I was the one who shot him,” she added casually, at his momentary look of confusion.

“Oh,” Tony said. Now that she mentioned it, he had come across that detail, reading up on the stuff he no longer remembered. “Well, he does get on my nerves sometimes.”

Sharon laughed.

They were quiet again, not so much the easy quiet of friendship, because despite all they had been through together, they were still not quite friends. Tony arrested Steve; Sharon shot him. Tony built the machine and Sharon was the anchor, and together they almost resurrected the Red Skull in Steve’s body. Both of them had been used time and time again against Steve. It was the quiet of commiseration—shared misery. Co-Presidents of the _We Killed Steve Rogers_ Club. But…

But.

That was unfair. Sharon had been used against her will, while Tony only had his own mistakes to blame, for the most part.

“I’m afraid,” he said finally, his voice hoarse, “that I’ll make the same mistakes again, if I don’t remember it, if I don’t remember—”

Sharon shook her head. “You remember your grief, don’t you? Your regrets,” she said. “Use it to push through. Focus on the things that actually matter. Everything else is just dressing.”

“The mission is all that counts,” Tony recited, throwing her own words back at her. Sharon raised an eyebrow.

“Not to fuel your tendency for ends justifying means, but yes. God, I hate the things I have in common with you,” Sharon said, but the words are accompanied by a friendly clap on his shoulder. She got to her feet and made her way back inside the safehouse, and she didn’t need to look over her shoulder to know that Tony was following.

The dining room was a bustle of activity, discussing HAMMER and Osborn still being at large. Steve, unsurprisingly, was in some argument with Maria, while Pepper looked on with exasperated fondness. Carol was on the holographic screen projected above the table, giving them a rundown of the situation in New York.

At their entrance, Steve looked up, smiling first at Sharon, then, more reservedly but no less sincerely, at Tony.

They were both back in the real world for the first time in a long while, from purgatory and back. But the real world was rife with its own problems—the mountain of issues they had just overcome, the mountain of issues they had yet to face—but they could face them just like they should've had from the start: on the same side, back to back.

A smile. An apology. A hand clasped in his own, held against his chest.

For the first time, in what seemed like an interminably long time, Tony felt something warm stir in his chest, something that vaguely resembled hope. He smiled back.

**Author's Note:**

> If anyone is keeping score at home, some scenes (especially in the earlier chapters) are lifted from the issues themselves, so some of dialogue might sound familiar. I rewrote a lot of material to what I think should've happened, against some of Matt Fraction's more what-the-fuck character/narrative decisions. Chapter titles are from IIM issue titles, if you're curious about which issues they're supposed to reflect in canon.
> 
> The premise of this fic is because Brubaker originally planned to have Tony during the Captain America _Reborn_ arc if not for canon scheduling conflicts so... I fixed that. Apologies for taking ages to finish and my thanks to Jesse and Kiran for helping this thing lumber along, as well as to everyone who's still reading!


End file.
